Investing the time to learn FreeBSD jails has led to a dramatic increase in the number of services I run in my “home lab.” Jails, which I have written about before, are effectively a lightweight quasi-virtualization technique which I use to create multiple software-defined networks to segment workloads. Jails have allowed me to change my “home lab” dramatically, allowing me to reduce the number of machines and increase hardware utilization. For now, the days of stacking machines, dangling Raspberry Pis, or hiding laptops on the shelf are all gone. Almost all my needs have been consolidated into a single FreeBSD machine running on a 4 year old used workstation.

I have attempted to consolidate the home lab before, but not with this level of success. There was the time I tried deploying a single-node Kubernetes cluster, which worked for a time until some upgrade caused the software-defined networking to break in a way I wasn’t interested in debugging in my free time. Following that I tried to go “old school” and started spinning up libvirt-based virtual machines which worked well for a long time. The major downside of that approach is that I simply wasn’t able to get much density because of the significant overhead for each virtual machine. At some point you run out of memory to commit to each VM.

Converting virtual machines to FreeBSD Jails took a few hours over a weekend, and since then the quantity of what is running has jumped dramatically. Originally I was running:

I now also run:

  • Elasticsearch
  • Graylog
  • Icinga
  • Icecast
  • MongoDB
  • Nginx
  • Peertube
  • PostgreSQL, which replaced MySQL for Nextcloud and is now running for multiple services.
  • Redis
  • Plus some personal web apps

To accomplish this, I use ZFS and Jails heavily. All the jails run on a striped and mirrored ZFS disk array which allows for better performance and redundancy than my previous incantation. These services are low-utilization which allows them to cooperate effectively within this machine’s 4 cores and 16GB of RAM.

Benefits

The higher utilization of this single machine, which is always-on, has a better power consumption profile than running multiple machines. More power efficiency wasn’t my original motivation however, I was much more interested in some of the system administration benefits of bringing these services “under one roof.”

Backups are much easier than before. I’m using some ZFS scripts to perform automatic snapshots on daily/weekly/monthly basis. Separately from those, I regularly push backups off-site and that’s trivial because at the “host” machine level, not the jail level, I can access all the filesystems at once.

Security is much easier as well since Jails are obviously providing a level of isolation. On top of that, I am using the vnet functionality in FreeBSD to provide additional network segmentation, something I never did with physical or virtual machines.

Management is pretty straightforward with all these services running in Jails. I typically do all my administration from the host rather than the jail level. As such I can pretty easily shuffle configuration files around. Unfortunately to date I haven’t found a good configuration management tool, including my own tinkering that provides a Jails-aware set of tools for more automation.

Downsides

The most notable downside to this approach is that a hardware failure could take me offline for a bit. These services are all dependent on a single power supply (PSU) and CPU. As such a failure of either would require me to keep all these services offline until that part could be replaced. For a home lab setup, I’m not expecting to support a specific SLA, so I’m quite comfortable with this risk.

I can imagine some security arguments that could be made, but frankly I think this Jails approach is much better secured than my previous home lab setups.

At present this machine has just under 10GB of RAM in use and a load average that floats between 1.0 and 2.0. Despite all the services that are running, it still uses less than my workstation with a few browsers open. To deploy your own “home lab” set up in this way you absolutely do not need a high powered machine. I would argue that a ZFS-based disk array is likely more important, after all most home lab tasks, that aren’t video-encoding, tend to be more disk I/O heavy rather than memory/CPU heavy.

This path isn’t quite entry-level simple, but if you have some systems administration experience, I think FreeBSD with ZFS and Jails is worth considering for your home or office lab.