What this is
A homelab is any infrastructure you manage yourself, and mine is all of it at once: playground, arena, forge, base of operations, and a rock. A place to explore, create, experiment, learn, change, and provide.
Currently: a Proxmox cluster, four NAS devices (one recently converted to a Proxmox node running Proxmox Backup Server), and more to come.
Why it exists
As a kid it was game servers and Plex. As an adult it became personal services, agency, and learning. As a professional it is proof of concept, dev workflow testing, and something to point at when words are not enough.
The hardware changes constantly — Theseus’s ship, one component at a time — but the purpose stays the same: build it yourself, for yourself, and learn something every time it breaks.
Current state
- Proxmox cluster running virtualized guests, with SDN mapping VLANs to VxLANs for guest networking
- Four NAS devices; one repurposed as a Proxmox node running PBS
- Internal backups via Proxmox Backup Server; experimenting with PBS client on all non-cluster hosts
- Physical network segmentation and firewall currently handled by Unifi
What I am figuring out
- Offsite backup: cloud-connected PBS, or a remote PBS instance over VPN? Either way, the hot/warm/cold site question is now open.
- Building an internal walled garden within the cluster: virtual gateway devices at the border, isolated internal networks with high bandwidth, designed to scale cleanly across current and future physical and virtual infrastructure
- Hardware consolidation: upgrading Phred (local AI server) and rethinking placement as the stack matures
- Shifting firewall, routing, and logging responsibility into the virtualized layer over time