Episode 27: Open, Repairable Homelab Hardware with 45HomeLab | The IT Guy Show 027

I've got a Dell PowerEdge R720 in colocation that sounds like a jet engine, it's six to eight years old, and I refuse to pay Dell a thousand dollars just to unlock its IPMI port. So instead of guessing my way into a replacement, I brought in someone who builds this hardware for a living.

Zack Perry is a Solution Specialist at 45Drives and the face of 45HomeLab, the homelab side of a company that's been building open, repairable, enterprise-grade storage since it was making servers for Backblaze. We walk the whole lineup, from the Home Client and Workstation up through the HL8, HL15, HL15 Beast, and the new Unraid X15, and Zack lays out which one actually fits what I'm running. Then he does the thing I needed: he takes my real numbers, 16 virtual machines and about 124 gigs of RAM with room to double, and points me at a specific box, right down to the CPU, the HBA, and how loud it is from three feet away.

We also get into what we both refuse to self-host, a good networking rabbit hole, and moving a whole lab onto an infrastructure-as-code workflow. If you're weighing colocation against bringing it home, this one's for you.

Chapters

00:00 Stream Start

00:38 Meet Zack Perry

04:09 From 45Drives to 45HomeLab

08:05 Why My R720 Has to Go

10:32 The 45HomeLab Lineup

18:33 What People Actually Run on These

21:22 Speccing My Next Box

30:43 The Noise Question