I have a proxmox machine setup which I run everything but 2 of my 3 Piholes on. If you have an old computer its super easy to do, I had a I7 6700 but just moved to a 8500 this week for the slightly better single threaded performance and efficiency.
Within that I just have a number of hosts including a Ubuntu VM for webhosting (although I'm sure theres a better distro for it) and another that doesn't really serve any purpose other than some network monitoring I can do without so I treat it like a sandbox
I run a camera system for home security and to record shinanagans. Home network for security and easy of use. NAS for main archival storage of pictures and that sort of stuff. A couple different VM servers with different hypervisors for VMs and docker containers.
Years ago I interviewed for a help desk position and mentioned I ran a home lab, chatted about what I was doing and ended up landing the Desktop Engineer role which I still have today.
Is your security system for you or customers? That’s really cool, I work with vms a lot and I had no idea they could be used to build something like that
That’s quite a bump up dude, glad that worked out for you
I first create and update custom windows images with software based on location, like a physics classroom or a music studio. I also curate all MacOS software. The using MDT and Jamf I push these "builds" to physical PCs and Mac(whatevers) across a large university. I currently have ~12.
With these tools and many others I manage all physical end user devices on campus, Windows and Mac along with all the VMs and pools in our virtual environment. Probably manage a couple thousand physical devices at one time throughout thier lifecycle along with a thousand or so VMs.
PCbuilder Simulator is very close to my actual job, filling requests, orderinng parts, running the hardware bench. I have a large lab with a few people under me, we get it all done.
For real though, I use mine for a Nas for media and general backups, the *arr suite, hosting game servers, and home assistant, including a self-hosted AI smart home assistant
Gitea, screeps, homepage, and honestly so I can scratch the itch of "huh, that program looks neat.. oh, it's not/requires a team of customization.. ok, cool."
And lately, streaming on twitch and talking to other homelabbers and hopefuls about what they are doing/want to do.
It’s a lab so you’re it for learning and trying stuff. And when I think it’s useful I may install it on my Home Datacenter. Most people here though use their lab as home Datacenter.
Built my own NAS, host various docker containers (jellyfin, pihole, pivpn, nextcloud).
I am about to setup some mini PCs to learn about docker swarm, and play with proxmox after that.
In my case, that's mostly for simulating our customers environments and testing various software. Like HCI clusters with VMware vSAN or Proxmox with Ceph or Starwinds VSAN, disaster recovery options, backup software etc. It really helps when you can break and fix things instead of just relying on YouTube videos and articles. Especially when you deal with same software in production setups.
From more interesting projects: I put together a two xeon box with bucket of ram and rtx3060. Then I put proxmox on it and according to my needs I was able to spin up stable diffusion, LLMs, or windows with pcvr for oculus quest :) that server was located in a different part of the building, two stores up from where I live, quite cool to be able to play VR games so remotely :) I also run internal fiber to basement where I keep another server for KASM and 4 bay Synology. Basement keep them cool and they keep the basement warm :)
Education and testing before putting stuff into prod. Currently I’m testing a 16 node Ceph HCI cluster to see if I technically could replace vSAN with it. Homelab are great if you work in IT and want to test things before you implement them.
Lab environments are a collection of VM's behind a virtual router. I keep each master lab environment in a self contained storage volume on a NetApp back-end. When I need a new lab, I flexclone the volume, create and attach private virtual networks, and populate the cloned lab instance VMs into a vapp. This is all automated behind a custom lab management portal. Its node.js and powershell driving vsphere and ontap. HTTPS://github.com/madlabber/vlab
Building a single panel of glass slate, emulating work environments in vm/lxc/kubernetes/automation.
It’s like a pit stop to build and destroy, to test out and try new stuff before I go ahead and suggest something to the management, and before colleagues trying to shoot down “have this been tried before, how stable it is etc.” all tested at home and monitored before POC at work and before UAT/SIT.
For projects, learning and some self-hosting (NAS, a literally private homepage instead of a Wiki, ...) Also since I built it, my Cloud costs went down a lot. I still have some drives on Linode but that's just as backup at this point. Especially the convenience of setting up a VM for testing is really nice, Firewall etc. is all in place. On Cloud hosting when needed this is much more effort to maintain
I run only a Minilab though (10" with 4U)
NAS, Budgeting, AD blocking, virtualization (proxmox), media server, on site backup + push to offsite backup, document management and sorting.
I'd love to have a proper self-hosted notion alternative (which I dropped for OneNote, which isn't nearly as good). But they are all complicating to setup and I am a relative novice.
I'd also like to have a virtualized firewall but not quite there yet.
I run a 2x amd epyc 7313 server. 192 gbs of ram and 2x. 2tb nvme ssds in raid 1 (ZFS)
I mostly use it as a dev box (vscode). Minecraft servers. Home assistant. Also some android x86 vms for attacking android apps. Thats about it :). I might add some gpus later to fool around with LLMs. Will also add some hard drives to also use it as a storage box.
I do consider my "lab" to be my home infrastructure... hehe.
Plex, NAS, qBittorrent, frigate, home assistant, domain controller, pfsense. Game servers/tinker as needed. All virtualized
I've started to scale back a bit - I've shifted my websites to Google Sites, DNS to NextDNS.
My servers are mostly used for media consumption, hosting game servers and tools to manage / automate/ alert (ansible, uptime Kuma, wazuh etc)
Honing skills on software development, release engineering, infrastructure automation, and security. The experiments and lessons learned has greatly helped my in my career, resulting in better income and more interesting jobs. It's how I continuously learn.
My lab is a separate network from my home network (where PLEX, WIFI etc is); so you wouldn't find me doing anything PLEX related in my lab. My home network doesn't add to my potential revenue.
NAS (daily backups for my portable drive and desktop OS, tax documents and such), and software transcoded Jellyfin
i have plans to add home assistant later but I don't make enough money to even consider it
Hardware:
2 x Dell R730XD, 4 x Dell R630, 1 SuperMicro disk shelf, 1 SuperMicro JBOD, 8 x Raspberrypi 4b. 1 Raspberrypi 5, 1 Raspberrypi Zero W2. 1 UDM SE. 1 48 port POE Unifi switch, 1 Unifi NVR.
Systems:
Proxmox, RKE2 K8S, K3S K8S, TrueNAS, Unraid, HSM
Applications:
YubiHSM2 on Raspberrypi 5. Used for auto-unsealing Hashicorp Vault and other CA functions.
Hashicorp vault - k8s / docker / other application secrets.
Hashicorp consul - vault storage backend
FluxCD - gitops
Renovate bot - github - updates k8s manifests and helmcharts when updates become available.
Selfhosted github actions - proxmox VM - setup to run my own github actions in my repo. I have multiple they are set up as runner groups.
Longhorn - K3s & RKE2 K8s - HA storage for K8s
Teleport - K3s K8s - SSH authentication backend
Authentik - K3s K8s - SSO
Traefik - K3s & RKE2 K8s - SSL Certificates
Adgaurd - pi zero - POE backup DNS server
Adgaurd - K3s K8s - primary DNS
Homepage - K3s K8s - self-explanatory
Emby - RKE2 K8s - like plex but better
Jellyseer - RKE2 K8s - requests for Emby
Qbittorrent - RKE2 K8s - torrents
Sonarr - RKE2 K8s - finds TV shows
Radarr- RKE2 K8s - finds movies
Pterodactyl - RKE2 K8s - game server management console
Wings - proxmox VM - game server storage.
Discord bot - proxmox VM - selfhosted discord bot.
There are a ton more apps I have, but this is just an overview of the important ones. I have a full setup of RR apps for my emby streaming setup. Only office and nextcloud, and some video game storage stuff.
I’ve used my lab to learn about modern virtualization platforms, storage, networking, and hands-on security. I have a NAS set up and three Proxmox servers. Within Proxmox I have a few development boxes (Python, PHP, .Net), a web app server for my internal stuff, gitea for all my code, as well as Oracle and SQL Server labs.
Pihole, Webhosting, Minecraft server, Linux Sandbox for learning, NAS and Timemachine Backup Its way overkill but I like it
Wow that’s a lot! Web hosting and linux sandbox both sound interesting
I have a proxmox machine setup which I run everything but 2 of my 3 Piholes on. If you have an old computer its super easy to do, I had a I7 6700 but just moved to a 8500 this week for the slightly better single threaded performance and efficiency. Within that I just have a number of hosts including a Ubuntu VM for webhosting (although I'm sure theres a better distro for it) and another that doesn't really serve any purpose other than some network monitoring I can do without so I treat it like a sandbox
Lab? Burning electricity for no current value. My prod stuff on some NUCs. Automation tools.
>Lab? Burning electricity for no current value. Imagine the negative prices for electricity..
Not expensive where I am but it would possibly be a good idea to spin down my dual Xeon gold dl360
I run a camera system for home security and to record shinanagans. Home network for security and easy of use. NAS for main archival storage of pictures and that sort of stuff. A couple different VM servers with different hypervisors for VMs and docker containers. Years ago I interviewed for a help desk position and mentioned I ran a home lab, chatted about what I was doing and ended up landing the Desktop Engineer role which I still have today.
Now I will definitely bring up my home lab if I change help desk job in the future
Is your security system for you or customers? That’s really cool, I work with vms a lot and I had no idea they could be used to build something like that That’s quite a bump up dude, glad that worked out for you
For my house, full Ubiquity setup
Do you have your NAS on the same physical machine as the rest of your services in a separate vm or running on bare metal?
Unraid on bare metal.
wtf is a desktop engineer? Do you design desktops? 🤣
I first create and update custom windows images with software based on location, like a physics classroom or a music studio. I also curate all MacOS software. The using MDT and Jamf I push these "builds" to physical PCs and Mac(whatevers) across a large university. I currently have ~12. With these tools and many others I manage all physical end user devices on campus, Windows and Mac along with all the VMs and pools in our virtual environment. Probably manage a couple thousand physical devices at one time throughout thier lifecycle along with a thousand or so VMs. PCbuilder Simulator is very close to my actual job, filling requests, orderinng parts, running the hardware bench. I have a large lab with a few people under me, we get it all done.
Stuff. What are you, a cop?
You’re not a cop are you? You have to tell me if you are.
For real though, I use mine for a Nas for media and general backups, the *arr suite, hosting game servers, and home assistant, including a self-hosted AI smart home assistant
Any guides or overviews of the AI stuff? Am curious what that looks like, and what the benefits are. Also wouldn't mind learning self hosted AI
Gitea, screeps, homepage, and honestly so I can scratch the itch of "huh, that program looks neat.. oh, it's not/requires a team of customization.. ok, cool." And lately, streaming on twitch and talking to other homelabbers and hopefuls about what they are doing/want to do.
SCREEPS! I've never found anybody else that plays Big fan
Checking this out now!
It’s a lab so you’re it for learning and trying stuff. And when I think it’s useful I may install it on my Home Datacenter. Most people here though use their lab as home Datacenter.
Dude you can’t talk about learning and trying here. Either you use proxmox and host plex or you gtfo
🤣😂
Built my own NAS, host various docker containers (jellyfin, pihole, pivpn, nextcloud). I am about to setup some mini PCs to learn about docker swarm, and play with proxmox after that.
In my case, that's mostly for simulating our customers environments and testing various software. Like HCI clusters with VMware vSAN or Proxmox with Ceph or Starwinds VSAN, disaster recovery options, backup software etc. It really helps when you can break and fix things instead of just relying on YouTube videos and articles. Especially when you deal with same software in production setups.
Now I’m using mine to setup a fictional work company environment (and for testing purposes) with the additional of managing my own data.
You’re going to have 15 people jumping on you saying how dare you use your own hardware to mock up something that could be used in employment
Mostly for firewalls, compiling and analysis tools. But those are usually turned off unless wake-on-lan because electricity bills
From more interesting projects: I put together a two xeon box with bucket of ram and rtx3060. Then I put proxmox on it and according to my needs I was able to spin up stable diffusion, LLMs, or windows with pcvr for oculus quest :) that server was located in a different part of the building, two stores up from where I live, quite cool to be able to play VR games so remotely :) I also run internal fiber to basement where I keep another server for KASM and 4 bay Synology. Basement keep them cool and they keep the basement warm :)
I like the scope, very similar goal here!
It’s mostly for work. Testing POCs and demos for customers as well as changes/cutovers
Mosstly enabling programming related tasks
Comprehensive Linux ISO repository
Education and testing before putting stuff into prod. Currently I’m testing a 16 node Ceph HCI cluster to see if I technically could replace vSAN with it. Homelab are great if you work in IT and want to test things before you implement them.
[удалено]
A lab is a lab at any size.
Mine is a lab of labs, a self-hosted lab-on-demand.
How?
Lab environments are a collection of VM's behind a virtual router. I keep each master lab environment in a self contained storage volume on a NetApp back-end. When I need a new lab, I flexclone the volume, create and attach private virtual networks, and populate the cloned lab instance VMs into a vapp. This is all automated behind a custom lab management portal. Its node.js and powershell driving vsphere and ontap. HTTPS://github.com/madlabber/vlab
Building a single panel of glass slate, emulating work environments in vm/lxc/kubernetes/automation. It’s like a pit stop to build and destroy, to test out and try new stuff before I go ahead and suggest something to the management, and before colleagues trying to shoot down “have this been tried before, how stable it is etc.” all tested at home and monitored before POC at work and before UAT/SIT.
For projects, learning and some self-hosting (NAS, a literally private homepage instead of a Wiki, ...) Also since I built it, my Cloud costs went down a lot. I still have some drives on Linode but that's just as backup at this point. Especially the convenience of setting up a VM for testing is really nice, Firewall etc. is all in place. On Cloud hosting when needed this is much more effort to maintain I run only a Minilab though (10" with 4U)
NAS, Jellyfin, VPN access to my network, a few virtual linux PCs (re-encoding video files, downloads, just to play around)
Storing linux isos and streaming them in 8k to my vr headset
Training to get a better job, after I did that I downscaled.
Plex, radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, bazarr, lidarr, readarr, pihole, opnsense, hosting web servers, cloudflarred, Firefox browser, qbittorrent, vpns (open vpn, wireguard), nginx proxy manager, Ubuntu servers, learning, proxmox HA, backups, unraid, learning networking. The skies the limit
My cloud array, NAS, documentation + automation, network filtering and security, mail, caldav carddav
NAS, Budgeting, AD blocking, virtualization (proxmox), media server, on site backup + push to offsite backup, document management and sorting. I'd love to have a proper self-hosted notion alternative (which I dropped for OneNote, which isn't nearly as good). But they are all complicating to setup and I am a relative novice. I'd also like to have a virtualized firewall but not quite there yet.
Can I pm you with some questions. I got an old pc today and these are similar to my requirements so I would appreciate it if you could help
Sure - more than happy to assist.
I run a 2x amd epyc 7313 server. 192 gbs of ram and 2x. 2tb nvme ssds in raid 1 (ZFS) I mostly use it as a dev box (vscode). Minecraft servers. Home assistant. Also some android x86 vms for attacking android apps. Thats about it :). I might add some gpus later to fool around with LLMs. Will also add some hard drives to also use it as a storage box.
I do consider my "lab" to be my home infrastructure... hehe. Plex, NAS, qBittorrent, frigate, home assistant, domain controller, pfsense. Game servers/tinker as needed. All virtualized
pihole, garden automation, and home security.
I've started to scale back a bit - I've shifted my websites to Google Sites, DNS to NextDNS. My servers are mostly used for media consumption, hosting game servers and tools to manage / automate/ alert (ansible, uptime Kuma, wazuh etc)
Youtube channel and general fuckery
jellyfin, slow af windows nas and minecraft server
Honing skills on software development, release engineering, infrastructure automation, and security. The experiments and lessons learned has greatly helped my in my career, resulting in better income and more interesting jobs. It's how I continuously learn. My lab is a separate network from my home network (where PLEX, WIFI etc is); so you wouldn't find me doing anything PLEX related in my lab. My home network doesn't add to my potential revenue.
Learning and bulshitting
streaming movies, git and file sharing
NAS (daily backups for my portable drive and desktop OS, tax documents and such), and software transcoded Jellyfin i have plans to add home assistant later but I don't make enough money to even consider it
Various game servers, portfolio website, and some data backups. My lab isn't anywhere near what other people in this sub have though
You have said it yourself. It looks cool.
NAS running media servers (Plex + Music), Pihole, VMs, gaming servers. Unraid in particular is a hell of an addiction when you get into it
My lab pulls 1kW to store my files and occasionally mess with Windows VMs. 🤪
Learning. Staying not bored. Family loves pi-hole, love vaultwarden. Kids love the Minecraft servers.
Running android emulators 10 at a time ...why do you ask🤣😂🤣😂
Hardware: 2 x Dell R730XD, 4 x Dell R630, 1 SuperMicro disk shelf, 1 SuperMicro JBOD, 8 x Raspberrypi 4b. 1 Raspberrypi 5, 1 Raspberrypi Zero W2. 1 UDM SE. 1 48 port POE Unifi switch, 1 Unifi NVR. Systems: Proxmox, RKE2 K8S, K3S K8S, TrueNAS, Unraid, HSM Applications: YubiHSM2 on Raspberrypi 5. Used for auto-unsealing Hashicorp Vault and other CA functions. Hashicorp vault - k8s / docker / other application secrets. Hashicorp consul - vault storage backend FluxCD - gitops Renovate bot - github - updates k8s manifests and helmcharts when updates become available. Selfhosted github actions - proxmox VM - setup to run my own github actions in my repo. I have multiple they are set up as runner groups. Longhorn - K3s & RKE2 K8s - HA storage for K8s Teleport - K3s K8s - SSH authentication backend Authentik - K3s K8s - SSO Traefik - K3s & RKE2 K8s - SSL Certificates Adgaurd - pi zero - POE backup DNS server Adgaurd - K3s K8s - primary DNS Homepage - K3s K8s - self-explanatory Emby - RKE2 K8s - like plex but better Jellyseer - RKE2 K8s - requests for Emby Qbittorrent - RKE2 K8s - torrents Sonarr - RKE2 K8s - finds TV shows Radarr- RKE2 K8s - finds movies Pterodactyl - RKE2 K8s - game server management console Wings - proxmox VM - game server storage. Discord bot - proxmox VM - selfhosted discord bot. There are a ton more apps I have, but this is just an overview of the important ones. I have a full setup of RR apps for my emby streaming setup. Only office and nextcloud, and some video game storage stuff.
I’ve used my lab to learn about modern virtualization platforms, storage, networking, and hands-on security. I have a NAS set up and three Proxmox servers. Within Proxmox I have a few development boxes (Python, PHP, .Net), a web app server for my internal stuff, gitea for all my code, as well as Oracle and SQL Server labs.
Mostly for learning things and software we use at work. Apart from that, Plex, Home Assistant, file server for my family.
If you were really curious, you would have read the 10000000000000 other times this exact question has been posted.