My Journey to Building My Dream Homelab

3 Nodes, Dual-WAN, and trying to figure out where all my money went.

It all started because I just wanted to host a personal project. I spun it up on a spare mini PC and used a Cloudflare Tunnel to access it since my ISP blocks port forwarding (probably for security reasons, but who knows). I actually gave up on this pretty quickly at first. The power interruptions in my country happen frequently and last so long that even a UPS couldn't keep things alive.

I gave it a second chance once we got solar panels and a battery installed. But then the new problem was unstable internet, which is why I ended up adding a prepaid modem router as a backup WAN.

I'm always cautious about the electricity bill and the heat components produce—heat is a huge issue where I live and wears parts down fast. So, I bought parts from China to build a low-power server around a Xeon E5-2650L v2. Putting it together the first time, I was sweating bullets because it just wouldn't POST. After reseating RAMs for a while, it finally worked.

I used this server for my automation tools and another mini PC as a budget NAS running OpenMediaVault with a 4TB Seagate Exos drive I bought years ago. (I couldn't afford a real NAS, and honestly, what an unfortunate year to build a homelab with how expensive components are right now).

After watching some homelab videos, I discovered Proxmox. I migrated everything over, but having only one node meant I was missing out on the cool stuff like ZFS and High Availability (HA).

Fast forward a few weeks, I decided to build a cluster. I wanted processors with a good balance of high core count, low power, and affordability. I landed on two barebone Dell Enterprise SFF PCs with i5-8500T processors (35W max TDP). I actually haggled with an eBay seller to get the processors for $40 each.

But RAM and SSDs are scary expensive right now, and I couldn't find any good deals on eBay. I gave up on storage and just cannibalized the SSDs from my old mini PCs. For RAM, my mini PC sticks weren't compatible with the enterprise Dells. But then I remembered Mercari Japan—a marketplace where I used to buy cheap second-hand guitars. I found a very good deal on a second-hand 64GB TeamGroup RAM kit for $250. It took weeks to ship, but hey, patience is a virtue.

Once those two Dells were set up with Proxmox, I had my 3-node quorum. I set up ZFS and HA for critical instances like my Cloudflare Tunnel, because without it I can't access my web apps. Now I can finally clean the dust out of my Xeon server without taking the network down, because I can just move the instances to the other two servers.

Later on, I wanted to create two virtual networks and a failover WAN, so I bought a mini PC firewall router and an L3 switch.

Let me tell you, setting up a virtualized pfSense router is a pain in the ass. The whole house was freaking out wondering why there was no internet. I honestly wished I had just bought a plug-and-play Fortinet firewall instead. I had to wait until everyone was asleep so I was the only one using the internet, just tinkering with DNS issues until I finally made it stable.

I'm not worried about single points of failure like having no redundancy for the firewall and switch—it's just a homelab. But my wallet definitely felt this project. Here is the final breakdown of the damage:

(Honestly, the total damage is probably higher once you factor in all the other random components I already owned and just reused to make this work.)