Home Lab – Owen Reynolds Personal blog

Let’s rack & roll with a Dell R640 to ‘serve the home’

The title of this blog was an obvious lift from the mighty Patrick Kennedy blog ServeTheHome Server Storage and Networking ReviewsCheck out the site or watch his related YT channel INTRO First, let’s start with some numbers 46 years old is my age as of Oct 2025 20 is the number of years I’ve been…
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Monitor upgrade for #2024

I’ve been WFH in one form or another for 11 years (2013 to 2024). As part of working from home, I want to ensure my home setup is optimized. This includes ergonomics, productivity , sound, function and ascetics (plants, window view) Each element has improved over the years, however, until the first week of January…
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vSan 8 express architecture on HP EliteDesk G4 home lab kit

My lab is in an in-between state, with 3x HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFFs (Skylake i5-6500) and two new HP EliteDesk 800 G4 units (i7-8700). Until last week, the 3x HP EliteDesk G3s were in a 3 node vSan 7 setup (non express architecture) which is Samsung 860 standard SSD for storage and Samsung evo…
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Before / after metrics for Citrix environments using free and built-in tools/scripts

Intro This post builds on a post I’d written last year on , where a client asked me to implement “Citrix direct workspaces” and wanted to show the before / after You might be engaged by your client or employer to investigate a performance issue. The request could come when you’re properly caffeinated and ready…
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Nutanix CE home lab build log

The plan For my new job, I’m studying for the Nutanix-MCI. I can use the Nutanix cloud-based labs system, but I’m a hands-on guy, and prefer to learn by practical example. I recently re-built my 3 node vSan cluster, and it was a lot of work to juggle the VMs due to the greater complexity…
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Home lab winter 2023 update – Desktop vs server hardware decision making process

It’s 2023, and time to re-visit my favorite topic: THE HOME LAB Last month, I took a new job focusing as a solutions architect implementing hypervisor / datacenter products for VMware & Nutanix. My new job is still with https://iti.ca/en/, and I’m happy to keep it in the family and not have to start over…
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Home lab 2022 update – house edition

It’s time for my favorite topic, home planning and upgrading 😁 This article will cover changes I’ve made or have planned based on the move to my house. You can read through in it’s entirety or skip to the respective sections for compute hosts, case/rack, networking, storage, hypervisor choices, desk workspace area, UPS, and monitoring…
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Final lab setup mid-2019 to now

Last year, I must have got a bit excited with the new gear I was buying, and I never ended up posting my final CONFIG, here it is! 3x HP EliteDesk 800 G3’s (product page) Each of the HP Elitedesk 800 G3s contains the following hardware: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz 4x 16 GB…
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Not all NVM drives are created equal!

Over the weekend, I learned the hard way what happens when you deviate from Vmware’s HCL list.Many months back, I’d decided on HP EX920 1TB NVM drives for my home lab ESXI 6.7 U1 hostsFor reference, the hardware for my hosts is level-set as follows:HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF (not on vmware HCL)Intel Core i5-6500 CPU…
Read more: Not all NVM drives are created equal!
Home lab upgrade log – April 26, 2019: "New" IP KVM switch has arrived!

In my last post on the topic of home lab upgrades, I’d stated I was going to use Intel Q370 based mobo’s to satisfy a long-standing need for IPMI/OOB/Lights-out mgmt of my various virtualization hosts That plan has now changed, as I’ve deiced to go with a more scalable solution that won’t lock me in…
Read more: Home lab upgrade log – April 26, 2019: "New" IP KVM switch has arrived!

Category: Home Lab