Miguel Pinto

Greetings, fellow homelab enthusiasts! It’s time to dive headfirst into the exhilarating world of home labs. If you’re teetering on the edge of setting up your own homelab (or expanding an existing one), one of the key decisions you’ll face is the type of hardware to use. Specifically, should you go for consumer-grade or enterprise-grade gear?

So, grab your favorite geeky mug of choice (coffee, tea, or your beverage of choice), sit back, and let’s embark on this decision-making journey together.

Introduction

Homelabbing has always been an exciting and educational experience for me. It’s a journey that started with a single server and has now evolved into a powerful 3-node cluster, allowing me to explore and experiment with a variety of technologies. In this article, I will share my personal experiences and insights on building and expanding my homelab, focusing on the benefits of using a 3-node VMware vSphere and vSAN cluster.

Introduction

Homelabs are a great way to learn about networking, servers and other technologies. They are also a great way to test new technologies and ideas without having to worry about breaking anything in production. In this post, I will be going over the steps I took to create my homelab.

Every homelab is different, and there is no right or wrong way to create one. Everyone has different needs and wants and that is what makes homelabs so great.

Clone this repo

Clone thsi repo with git clone https://github.com/lookatitude/flux-infra.git. Navigate to the flux-infra directory.

Kubernetes Cluster

In order to follow this manual you’ll need to setup a local kuberntes cluster.

Existing cluster

If you have a local cluster already just change your context to that cluster and move to step 2

Setup local cluster with Kind

Follow the steps on kind to install Kind in your system.

After the kind cli is installed just spin your new cluster:

Introduction

When you are developing applications that will ultimatly use kubernetes you ideally want your developement environment to be as close to your staging or production environments. Kind helps you create a local kubernetes cluster easely and in a repeatable way, it also helps you use your local environment to test some scenarios.

There are several different tools that can be used to create local kubernetes clusters, like minikube, k3s, docker desktop and many more. So why use Kind? Kind is a tool for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker container “nodes”. this means we can run clusters multiple nodes on a local environment.