I have a lab of equipment that I use to replicate some of what an enterprise setup would provide. Every system and configuration has been tuned for minimal power usage and cost. I am often reusing recycled equipment or second hand devices from some other source. My belief is that running on minimal hardware, while more difficult, forces me to learn how to properly tune devices and services.This site (along with a host of other services) is hosted on a Prodesk 450 G4 that no longer supports the latest version of Windows.

My current iteration of the lab is a proxmox cluster of hosts with one large compute server and several re-purposed mini desktops to run the lower powered compute services. From this hypervisor environment I have configured virtual machines (VM) to run services, LXC containers for the same, and VMs to run a docker swarm environment. I virutalize my docker swarm to allow for easier hardware maintenance/lifecycle.

Storage is provided by a whitebox running Truenas Scale. This provides both ISCSI and NFS services to the cluster for vm disk (block but not really in the case of NFS) storage as well as a separate NFS share for file storage. With proper tuning and hardware selection I was able to get NFS to perform within 5% of ISCSI.

Backups run to a local Proxmox Backups Server (PBS) and this replicates to a second PBS offsite. The NAS that hosts all of the data replicates to a second on-site NAS nightly.

The network switch is a Mikrotik CRS326 24S+2QRM This is a 10G SFP+ based switch that I use for layer 2. It is capable of layer 3 but I have so far not needed more inter-vlan bandwidth than my firewall provides. I have a 1G distribution switch for any 1G devices, this also runs on layer 2.

My firewall is a whitebox PFsense build that provides about 5Gbits of bandwidth on a single stream and greater than 15Gbits with multiple streams. I use Pfsense to do all of my layer3 routing.