A homelab server is a kind of server that you can build and use at your own home. It lets you run different applications and systems on virtual machines that you can create and manage. You can use a homelab server for learning, testing, or having fun with various technologies and software.

Having a homelab server has many advantages. For example, you can:

• Try new things without messing up your main PC or paying for cloud services.
• Make your own projects that would be expensive or difficult to do with professional services, such as a media server, a video surveillance system, a remote access server, or a backup solution.
• Keep your privacy and security by storing and running your own data and applications locally instead of on third-party cloud providers.
• Enjoy and challenge yourself by building cool stuff with your own hardware and software.

To build a homelab server, you need some hardware parts such as a CPU with many cores, a lot of RAM memory, SSD hard drive storage space (or at least dedicated HDD storage), graphics card with dedicated memory, and an operating system that works with virtual machines. You also need some software tools such as virtualization software (for example, VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V).

At this point in time, I've had 2 homelab servers which I named ‘TheARK’.

• TheARK-V1 was a Raspberry Pi 4B (4GB) running OpenMediaVault connected to 2 external USB Western Digital Hard Drives, providing a NAS and basic Plex service. OpenMediaVault is a free and open source NAS solution that runs on Debian Linux. It lets you turn your Raspberry Pi into a powerful file server with a web interface and support for various services and plugins. To use OpenMediaVault with Raspberry Pi, you need to download the ISO image from the official website and burn it to a CD or USB stick. Then you can boot from it and install it on your Raspberry Pi. You can also install it from the command line using a script that will download and set up everything for you. Once you have installed OpenMediaVault, you can access its web interface using your Raspberry Pi’s IP address. There you can configure your storage drives, file shares, users, permissions, and other settings. You can also install plugins that add more features to your NAS, such as media server, BitTorrent client, backup solution, and more.
• TheARK-V2 (pictured above) was a desktop class system that used Intel Workstation/Server hardware and ran UNRAID OS. Unraid is a server operating system that lets you use any combination of hardware to store and protect data, run applications, and create virtual machines. Unraid is based on Linux and uses a unique file system that allows you to add or replace drives of different sizes and types without losing data. Unraid is easy to use and flexible, with features like one-click parity setup, docker container management, virtual machine support with hardware passthrough, and more. Unraid also supports plugins and community apps that extend its functionality. To use Unraid, you need to download the ISO image from the official website and burn it to a USB flash device. Then you can boot your server from the USB device and configure Unraid using a web interface. You can also purchase a license to unlock more features and support. Unraid is a great solution for anyone who wants to have ultimate control over their data, media, applications, and desktops. Due to having 22 Cores, 44 Threads, a GPU and multiple 8TB drives, the power consumption was around 60-80w during regular operation which was 24/7. After the huge hike in energy costs in the UK the server alone would cost £300-400 per year just to run in electricity costs which is not worth at all. This is the primary reason for the next installment in this arc.

This brings us to the new server, TheARK-V3, designed to be a low power, efficient but compute focused system that would be compact and ready for 24/7 operation. I decided to use a 10th Generation Intel processor due to their ability to idle at only a few watts and also their amazing integrated graphics that could encode/decode H265 content. This allows for Plex transcoding to be done without a dedicated GPU and can easily handle 10 concurrent transcoded streams simultaneously. The motherboard was an ITX LGA 1200 board that has enough SATA ports for a few drives and can support enough memory. I went with the ITX form factor. I also used a 1TB PCIE NVME SDD that will act as our cache drive, a cache drive in Unraid is a drive that temporarily stores data before moving it to the main data drives. It can improve the performance and reliability of your server by using faster or more resilient drives than your data drives. You can have multiple cache drives in a single pool or multiple pools with different settings. I also went for 2x32GB DDR4 sticks of memory which is enough for all of the docker containers and VMs I plan to run. For hard drives, I went with 2x16TB Seagate Exos drives which are enterprise hard drives that offer high capacity, performance and reliability for data center applications. They use helium technology to reduce power consumption and noise. One drive will act as a parity disk that provides redundancy if one drive fails. The power supply is an important choice when focusing on a low power system since typical desktop PC PSUs are not very efficient at low loads, however due to new ATX standards the new Corsair RM series of PSUs are incredibly efficient at very low loads such as sub 10 and 20w. For now I just put everything into a spare ATX case that I had laying around but I plan to move it all into an ITX Nas focused case that allows for more drive expansion in a compact area.

Installing UNRAID involves downloading the image and creating a bootable USB drive which is simple to do. An important thing to note here is that the OS actually runs from system memory and is copied from the USB stick so it is crucial to select a reliable one. Then I inserted this USB stick and booted into the UEFI BIOS to enable Virtualisation and also set memory speeds and fan curves. I also set the boot device to the USB drive here. After saving the changes and resetting UNRAID should initialise and provide an IP address where you can access the Web GUI, but I wanted to ensure that this IP address was static and not dynamically assigned using the routers DHCP pool. This involved manually reserving an IP address for the MAC address of the server in my routers config. Once I had the correct static IP address assigned I could reach the Web UI and start configuring the basic options such as allocating drives, setting up names and shares, enabling docker and setting the time.