How it started
Over the years I have seen people picking up different hobbies. Some do soldering, some create games, some build crazy stuff in Fusion360, print it and then use it to display bus timetable. Or check out Jeff Geerling, he has some crazy builds.
All the people that have inspired me were tweakers, crazy hackers one might say, so why not to become one.
I decided to go with a small homelab to allow me play around with different technologies and upskill me for the job. Who said that work could not be fun ?
Hardware Specs
- MacMini Pro 2018 i3 3.6 Ghz, 8GB DDR4, 256GB SSD x3
- MacMini M1 2020 x1
- Seagate 2TB external drive x2
- Ubiquiti Device Bridge Switch (was planning to run in another room, but ended up in the same place as the router)
- Ubiquiti UDR 5G Max
- GeekPi DeskPi
It seems pretty unconventional to run on pure Apple hardware when a bunch of folks choose HPs, Dells, etc and run Proxmox, but I JUST LOVE APPLE. So sod off Apple haters. (And I got the hardware quite cheap)
Designation
- Intel-based MacMini are running VMWare Fusion as a hypervisor with Talos Linux based Kubernetes
- M1 MacMini is also using VMWare Fusion but host standalone VM and is used for GPU hungry things (Example: Plex Transcoding)
I will add pictures later, I think….