Personal Homelab

Ryan Pek (b. 2001) | 3rd Year Undergraduate SUTD | Canned food enjoyer

EPYC 7542 Proxmox Node

This is the current main compute node of my homelab. It replaced the HP Z640 as the serious Proxmox box, mostly because I wanted more PCIe lanes, more memory headroom, IPMI, more local NVMe, and enough GPU space to separate media transcoding from AI experiments.

The short version: Supermicro H12SSL-I, AMD EPYC 7542, ECC LRDIMM, Proxmox, 10G networking, RTX 3090, Quadro P2200, and a bunch of dead RDIMMs.

Hardware

Role in the Lab

This machine is meant to be the main VM and GPU host. The old Debian server used to carry too many services in one Docker Compose file, which worked until the service list became too long and every change felt like defusing a bomb. The EPYC node lets me split services into clearer VMs, assign VLANs properly, and pass through GPUs to the workloads that actually need them.

Proxmox Layout

Proxmox is the base hypervisor. The current VM flow is to use a Debian cloud-init template with qemu-guest-agent, then let Terraform clone and size VMs, and let Ansible take over the actual configuration. This took a while to make sane because guest-agent state, cloud-init timing, and Proxmox clone behaviour all have opinions.

Networking is done through a VLAN-aware bridge connected to the 10G path. VMs get placed into the relevant VLAN instead of everything living in one flat network like an accidental LAN party.

GPU Split

The RTX 3090 is better spent on local LLM experiments, Open WebUI/Ollama, and anything that needs 24GB of VRAM. The P2200 is a better fit for Jellyfin transcoding, because media serving should not have to fight an LLM for GPU time just because I asked a model to explain Raft while someone is watching anime.

Status