Co-lo or homelab: how do you manage it?

[awedio]

For those of you with servers in a co-lo or a sizeable homelab:

How do you manage access to all the hardware?

Is there some "fancy" private cloud software? (single pane of glass)

VPN/RDP?

Looking for some ideas!

 

[BlueFox]

Always-on site-to-site VPN via pfSense gets me access the management/internal VLAN at the datacenter. Pretty basic, but works well enough. Helps that I have a static IP at home.

 

[Pete.S.]

VPN here as well. OpenVPN with certificates to be precise. You can't let things such as IPMI sit unprotected on the internet. Too many vulnerabilities.

 

[zac1]

Site-to-site VPN, as simple as a WireGuard tunnel, along with something like IPMIView for remote management at the hardware level.

For everything else, I like to run a sort of jumpbox with something like Apache Guacamole to simplify access from multiple locations/devices.

 

[acquacow]

I do everything over ssh.
All my home systems are atx supermicro boards with IPMI for remote power-on/etc...

 

[Sean Ho]

Same here, wireguard and ssh. Helps to provision everything, both on-prem and remote, via ansible.

 

[CyklonDX]

colocation a vpn with 2factor auth (sms/text code).
homelab ssh/ipmi/management dashboards (like cockpit/unraid/trunas) ~ not exposed to net.

ansible playbooks to make bigger changes on big pool of hosts.
normal rdp for windows boxes, or royalts if you deal with big pool of hosts on daily basis; else parsec/moonlight.

 

[i386]

@Op do you have a specific problem or is it just a general question?

I used to manage my esxi hosts with vmware workstation and ssh, windows server via rdp & vnc and ubuntu server via ssh.
Too many different tools; I boiled all the systems down and have now just (real)vnc and ssh

 

[awedio]

@i386 Just a general question & wanting to see what other are doing/using.

 

[awedio]

I'm surprised no vendor has some type of fancy gui/private cloud manager that is single pane of glass!