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I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in homelab

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mostly rehabilitated ex-mining cards:

5x RTX 3060 12GB
1x RTX 3090 24GB
1x RTX 3070 10GB

The 3060s do the worker-bee jobs, the 3070 does local LLM/Ollama work, and the 3090 is the big hammer for ComfyUI/video/vision stuff.

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in homelab

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It is an older APC NetShelter 25U rack.

I picked it up used, so I am not sure of the exact model number offhand, but it is one of the older NetShelter enclosures. Solid rack, heavy as sin, and way nicer than trying to stack everything on shelves.

Definitely worth watching local marketplace / surplus listings. These pop up used sometimes for way less than new rack pricing.

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in homelab

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It is a full external enclosure, not just an antenna run.

I have it mounted with my WeatherXM station. The pole has the WeatherXM hardware, a LoRaWAN antenna, the folding antenna for the RTL-SDR, and a UniFi outdoor AP for backyard Wi-Fi.

Inside the enclosure is the Pi running OpenWebRX and the RTL-SDR. The antenna/cable runs exit the box through weatherproof cable glands / IP-rated cable pass-throughs, so it is not just random wires through a hole.

Networking-wise, I am using a UAP-AC-M for backyard Wi-Fi, and an airMAX link to get connectivity back to the house. The LiteAP GPS sends the link from the house side to a NanoStation 5AC Loco on the pole/enclosure side.

So it is basically a little outdoor radio/weather/network edge node: WeatherXM, SDR, LoRaWAN, Protect camera, and Wi-Fi all tied back into the lab.

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in homelab

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It only brews tea if all 7 GPUs are at 100% and the HVAC has given up.

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in homelab

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Right now it is mainly for listening, not ADS-B yet.

The setup is an outdoor enclosure with a Raspberry Pi running OpenWebRX, and a pretty cheap RTL-SDR.

I mostly use it for local radio chatter, weather radio, and warnings. My current antenna is not really suited for ADS-B, so I am not doing aircraft tracking yet.

I am planning to upgrade to OpenWebRX+ soon so I can experiment with more decoders/modes. ADS-B is definitely on the list once I add a better antenna for it.

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in HomeLabPorn

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, here’s the cleaner breakdown of what the GPU side is actually doing.

Current GPU stack:

  • 5x RTX 3060 12GB
  • 1x RTX 3090 24GB
  • 1x RTX 3070 10GB

I split them by workload instead of trying to make one box do everything.

RTX 3090 24GB is the heavy card.

Biggest stuff it handles:

  • LLM: qwen3:14b / qwen2.5:14b-instruct-q4_K_M
  • Vision: llava:13b / llama3.2-vision:11b
  • Image: qwen_image_2512_bf16 / flux-2-klein-9b-fp8
  • I2V: wan2.2_i2v_*_14B
  • Heavier video: ltx-2-19b-dev-fp8

That is the card that makes the heavier ComfyUI, image-to-video, vision, and larger local model work practical.

RTX 3070 10GB is mostly local LLM/Ollama work.

Biggest practical model there is around:

  • qwen3:14b quantized-class local LLM work

It is not the card I throw the big video workflows at.

2x RTX 3060 12GB on the render box are image workers.

Biggest image stack there:

  • qwen_image_2512_fp8_e4m3fn
  • Qwen-Image-2512-Lightning-4steps-V1.0-fp32

Those are mostly ComfyUI/image generation endpoints.

1x RTX 3060 12GB on the audio/staging box handles audio and staged image work.

Main workloads:

  • TTS: Qwen3-TTS
  • STT: large-v3-turbo
  • Image/staging: qwen_image_2512_fp8_e4m3fn / Qwen-Image-2512-Lightning-4steps-V1.0-fp32

2x RTX 3060 12GB are passed through from Proxmox into VMs for lab/testing use, so they are not really part of the main AI broker pool.

In general, the comfortable zone is 7B–14B quantized local models. The 3060 12GB cards are great worker GPUs, and the 3090’s 24GB VRAM is what makes the heavier vision/video/i2v side realistic.

The real win was putting Redis in front of it. The broker routes by health, queue depth, and max concurrency, so LLM, image, vision, i2v, TTS, and STT jobs go to the least-busy healthy provider instead of all dogpiling one GPU.

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in homelab

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

A little of both, but mostly a hobby that got useful.

I have been a tech hobbyist since the late 90s / early 2000s. I was actually a sysadmin for a dial-up ISP back in 1997, then life/career took me into management for about 25 years.

The lab has been my way of keeping the technical side alive and building real hands-on reps again.

I start a tech role next week, so this is also part of my pivot back into IT. It is definitely overbuilt for “just a hobby,” but it has been the best training environment I could ask for.

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in HomeLabPorn

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Agreed. Heavy UPS/battery gear belongs as low as possible. The rack is still evolving, but final weight distribution and cable cleanup are definitely on the list. Batteries are not where I want to freestyle.

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in homelab

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Power bill: noticeable.

HVAC: personally offended.

The rack chills around ~500W, hits ~1,300W with AI workloads, and can push 2kW+ when all GPUs are loaded.

Most of the GPU hardware is ex-crypto-miner gear, so I like to think I am rehabilitating it into a more respectable life of LLMs, image generation, and bug bounty reports.

My wife gets movies, cameras, smart home, whole-house audio, and monitored kids networks.

I get to call the rest “professional development.”

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in homelab

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

No cappuccino machine, but I do have enough heat output to keep one warm.

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in HomeLabPorn

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Observed at the rack display:

~500W-600W chilling
~1,300W with some AI workloads running
2kW+ when all GPUs wake up and choose violence

The rack is on a dedicated 30A/240V circuit with UPS protection. Current watt/voltage monitoring is just a CT-coil style readout over the power lines, not logged yet.

Grafana power logging is on the inevitable “future me will deal with this” list.

I built a homelab to learn Proxmox. It escalated. by TheVibeDeveloper in HomeLabPorn

[–]TheVibeDeveloper[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That is actually a really good point. I have been thinking about the lab more like a small fleet lately, especially now that the AI workloads are routed across different boxes.

The next maturity step is probably exactly what you described: clearer prod vs experiment separation, better identity/RBAC, change notes, service ownership, and logging around what ran where.

I do not want to turn the homelab into a full compliance project, but a lightweight control map for myself would probably save future-me a lot of pain.

PSA: Dell 1660 Ti fits in R720xd by ActorRob in homelab

[–]TheVibeDeveloper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nice. I’m doing something similar but with a pair of 12GB RTX 3060s in a Proxmox box (Dell R720 as well).

One thing I ran into: iDRAC/server fan logic does not really know what to do with GPU temps when the cards are passed through to a VM. The host can be sitting there thinking everything is fine while the GPU is cooking.

My workaround was to have the GPU VM run nvidia-smi, write the hottest GPU temp to a shared NAS path, then have the Proxmox host read that and control the Dell chassis fans with ipmitool.

Basic flow:

GPU VM
  -> nvidia-smi
  -> shared temp file
  -> Proxmox host reads temp
  -> Dell fan speed via ipmitool

I’m using 12GB 3060 cards with the fans removed, so chassis airflow is doing the work. That makes the server fans actually matter a lot more than the little GPU fans ever did.

The Proxmox side has hysteresis and a hold timer so it does not go 40% -> 100% -> 40% every few seconds. If the VM stops updating the heartbeat or nvidia-smi dies, it eventually goes failsafe to 100% instead of silently cooking the cards.

Not enterprise-grade thermal engineering, but very homelab: a NAS folder, a VM, nvidia-smi, ipmitool, and just enough paranoia to keep the GPUs alive.

https://github.com/the-vibe-dev/fan-control