It's time to change up the lab once again. For the past couple years I had this focus on what I guess would be "old school" sysadmin and datacenter stuff. I had a bunch of VMWare stuff as well as classic linux management stuff like yum repos. Then at some point last year I threw on some kubernetes and gitlab but was still stuck on the old hardware infrastructure mindset. I'm now finally changing that.

Earlier this year my lab was kind of sitting idle for a while because life had caught up with me and I realized its burning a lot of electricity running 24/7 like that, roughly $40/month. On the one hand that isn't all that much, but once I started looking at what actually needed to run all the time I realized I could shuffle some things around and remove some things all together.

In a way I suppose I'm moving to more of a developer workflow. I want to be able to quickly spin up and tear down resources and I want to do as much as I can with code. I want to be able to share bits of my work with people and it's much easier for me to share a git repo than it is for me to try to explain some part of my lab to someone who isn't familiar with it. I already have a bunch of stuff on a public git server, but it's just a small portion.

Maybe I should take a step back. What is the purpose of my home lab? Personal improvement. At some point I lost track of that. I started using the lab as an extension of work to help push short term job growth. It wasn't the first time and probably won't be the last, but it has made me realize some things. My whole career growth has been based around proving to myself and others that I can do something. Early on I had no experience and so I needed the lab to quickly get up to speed on things before it became apparent I had no idea what I was doing.

What Does a Homelab Cost?

Doing some rough calculations I've found my lab costs roughly $40 a month for electricity alone. On top of that are licensing for VMUG Advantage($15/month). I should probably also count hardware upgrades but fortunately those have been sparse enough to not worry about. So at $50 a month is it worth it? Furthermore, now that I've made the jump to devops does the home lab even make sense any more?

Sort of, but not really. I still need to do some things on VMs but I don't really have any need for VMWare now. So I bumped my desktop up to 64 GB of RAM which should be plenty to run anything I need. Now, it's just a matter of cleaning up the stuff that was running.

Current VM Rundown

I managed to break my rancher cluster so that kind of took care of destroying itself. I'll relocate emby to the storage server as a podman service. My OPNSense VM got replaced with a Ubiquiti Edgerouter 4. Bookstack will be replaced by a wiki in gitlab (now that gitlab wikis are stored in their own git repos). Infoblox will go away since that was just for playing with ansible and terraform. I do need to find a home for guacamole though I don't really need that any more either. Mysql will get destroyed once bookstack is gone.

Katello, gitlab, and chef are the interesting ones. I suppose there is no reason to keep katello around since I can just configure the upstream repos on VMs directly if needed. Gitlab could be replaced with their PaaS offering though I do like having my own (2023 update, I love gitlab cloud). Chef server also still has its uses so I'll probably keep that one as well (2023 not missing chef at all).

So really all that infrastructure for 2 VMs, its pretty clear I should be able to shut it down and only spin it up if I have a project that needs it. Of course the storage server will keep running and I may even update it a bit so it can run the gitlab and chef VMs.

Finally, not a VM but the somewhat power hungry Cisco 3560G should probably be swapped out for the SG300 switch though that will mean using a POE injector for the WAP.

The Future Lab

The new plan for the lab is to spin up cloud resources as needed and for big or long running things use my desktop. VMs in the cloud? Obviously I would lose the VMWare components, but the AWS/Azure experience would make up for that. I also have some perpetually running services at home though those could probably run on my main desktop or possibly something more power friendly.

Migrating to the Cloud

To start things off I'm signing up for a gitlab.com account, this should also allow me to get rid of my gitea instance and possibly even the server hosting the blog. Next, my virtual Opnsense firewall needs to be moved to its own physical appliance which will also replace my Asus router. All that is left after that are POC VMs and my Rancher cluster both of which can likely live on my desktop. So perhaps this is less a migration to the cloud and more just a right-sizing of things with the option to build in the cloud if I need a burst of more resources.