RIP Home Lab
I’ve never posted here before, but as I wrap up a big chapter, I wanted to share something special. Today, I spent the entire day disassembling my home lab as I prepare to sell it, and I couldn't let this moment pass without showing it off one last time.
While I’ll still have a smaller setup in the future, life is keeping me busy right now, so my lab will be a bit more low-key for the time being.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
This lab was built for high-performance virtualization, automation, and networking, featuring a full MikroTik infrastructure (excluding an OPNsense firewall) with 10GbE throughout and 20-40GbE uplinks between key devices for low-latency, high-bandwidth communication.
Compute & Virtualization:
I had two Proxmox clusters optimized for different workloads:
Cluster 1: Three Intel N100 mini PCs, great for lightweight workloads and energy efficiency.
Cluster 2: Three Supermicro nodes, each with an AMD EPYC Embedded 3251, 128GB RAM, 10GbE networking, and 3TB SSD storage, providing a solid foundation for more demanding virtualization tasks.
Additionally, a standalone Supermicro storage server ran TrueNAS Scale with 12TB of SSD storage, originally intended for promised storage allocations and backup tasks.
Use Cases & Experiments:
This lab was mainly used for:
Kubernetes cluster automation, focusing on GitOps-driven deployments and a self-managed DevOps environment.
Experimenting with various container orchestration solutions, including a Docker Swarm cluster.
Testing Proxmox Ceph, though I ultimately decided to remove it after evaluating its performance and management overhead.
Love to hear about similar experiences people had and happy to answer any questions anyone has!
I’ve never posted here before, but as I wrap up a big chapter, I wanted to share something special. Today, I spent the entire day disassembling my home lab as I prepare to sell it, and I couldn't let this moment pass without showing it off one last time.
While I’ll still have a smaller setup in the future, life is keeping me busy right now, so my lab will be a bit more low-key for the time being.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
This lab was built for high-performance virtualization, automation, and networking, featuring a full MikroTik infrastructure (excluding an OPNsense firewall) with 10GbE throughout and 20-40GbE uplinks between key devices for low-latency, high-bandwidth communication.
Compute & Virtualization:
I had two Proxmox clusters optimized for different workloads:
Cluster 1: Three Intel N100 mini PCs, great for lightweight workloads and energy efficiency.
Cluster 2: Three Supermicro nodes, each with an AMD EPYC Embedded 3251, 128GB RAM, 10GbE networking, and 3TB SSD storage, providing a solid foundation for more demanding virtualization tasks.
Additionally, a standalone Supermicro storage server ran TrueNAS Scale with 12TB of SSD storage, originally intended for promised storage allocations and backup tasks.
Use Cases & Experiments:
This lab was mainly used for:
Kubernetes cluster automation, focusing on GitOps-driven deployments and a self-managed DevOps environment.
Experimenting with various container orchestration solutions, including a Docker Swarm cluster.
Testing Proxmox Ceph, though I ultimately decided to remove it after evaluating its performance and management overhead.
Love to hear about similar experiences people had and happy to answer any questions anyone has!