Random thoughts on old PC hardware, Virtualization and making RPIs and embedded PCs redundant

superczar

Skilled
Long time since I posted something (presumably) useful around here - so thought might as well post about my experiments over the last 1 year about reusing some old hardware and replacing my entire fragmented home computing infra into one place.

Also, many thanks to @vivek.krishnan for his tips/inputs along the way!

I probably have 30+ IoT devices, 4 RPIs , a couple of ageing NASs , a crumbly NVR and a bunch of old routers/APs doing all sorts of various duties around the household
Like many of the folks around here, I also have several old CPU/MOBOs/3.5" HDDs etc lying unused in some corner or attic

Sometime in the recent past, I thought to myself how do I consolidate all this- So I read up a bit about virtualisation and decided to re-assemble an old i3 4th gen system with a couple of oldish HDDs
TBH, I thought the whole virtualisation gig will be too hard/troublesome but proceeded nonetheless

To cut a long story short, it turned out to be an endeavour really worth my/anyone's while

I was able to knock off all the RPIs /NASs/aforementioned moody NVR and routers into a single unit sitting in a corner of the attic
That poor old discarded CPU now serves as a:
  • Load balancer yielding 150 mbps Internet aggregation speeds with a 3rd WAN failover to Airtel 4G
  • state of the art UTM/Firewall appliance providing VPN connectivity to my home/webfiltering/Intrusion prevention
  • NAS yielding 60 MB/s (480 mbps) LAN transfer speeds
  • NZB/torrent downloader/aggregator
  • NVR for 4 video cameras
  • A windows desktop (via RDP) just for kicks
  • Home Automation server for my IoT devices
  • small linux instance running homebridge (translator for non HomeKit certified IoT devices for Apple HomeKit for the family phones)
  • small linux instance running habridge (translator for none Alexa certified devices for the physical Echo devices)
  • A guinea pig that helps ensure I don't have to wipe systems/disks clean in case I want to try a new OS/distro
Net spend - 3X 699 INR for 3 GBe LAN cards for the 3 WAN ports I needed
Another few K (can't recollect how much ) to get an extra 8GB of RAM for all the VM instances to not feel some RAM TLC

Point of the thread :
  • Like I said, random thoughts for posterity's sake
  • pointer to fellow members - virtualisation is easier (and way more useful ) than I thought
  • Save time for anyone interested : I toyed with several platforms till settling down on proxmox for virtualization / Sophos XG for routing/firewall... choice of VMs for NAS/automation etc is not that material - just pick the linux distro(s) of your choice
 
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