About

The Journey from a Homelab to a Production Server: Discovering the Power of The Mainframe

In the early stages of my career, when I was still learning about programming and devops, finding a suitable testing environment became crucial. For someone like me who had limited resources at work, setting up a self-hosted system seemed both practical and ideal. This is where The Mainframe came into play.

When starting, I originally names all my Servers and VMs after characters from Archer. TheMainframe was the collective name for all of them.

Setting Up My Homelab: The Birth of The Mainframe

As with most homelabs, my journey started with a Plex Server running on an old family PC, some old Dell desktop with an under powered CPU and next to no RAM. This worked well enough to grow my ambitions and shrink my wallet.

From there it slowly grew from a desktop PC case to a Server Rack with some enterprise gear, I went through a couple of Dell R7** servers and even a couple of 1u dell servers until I finally scaled back and settled on more consumer hardware for power savings.

It now runs mostly on a i7-6700K and an nvidia P4. It runs a handful of various selfhosted applications including Plex, Nextcloud, Authentik, Ollama, Openweb-ui, Stable diffusion etc.

The end goal is to self host as much of my data as possible.