Defining a Homelab
I feel people get too hung up on defining what a homelab is and get too distracted on the nuances when trying to spin up their own homelab. Well, let me tell you something, a homelab can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be.
You installed VMware/Virtualbox on your device and spun up a VM? Homelab. You installed Proxmox on 2 mini-pcs you got from e-cycling and clustered them? Homelab. You installed Arch on your toaster from 10 years ago just because you could? Believe it or not, homelab.
Homelabs don’t even necessarily have to be something you keep at home either. You can absolutely have your homelab in the cloud. Maybe you’re working on a project that lives in the cloud, or you’re just practicing spinning up and breaking down environments in the cloud with Terraform. That is a totally valid homelab.
There is no strict definition to what a homelab is, despite what you see online when browsing Google or r/homelab on Reddit. Instead of overwhelming yourself about what a homelab should be, start small and build out from there.
Why Homelabs?
Some people don’t get the chance to get exposure to the things they want at work, so they turn to homelabs for that exposure. Most people know that you shouldn’t play in prod, but sometimes a test environment isn’t available so they might have to take some risks, or they make their own test environment.
I personally find them very useful to learn and practice new skills, and have a safe space to make mistakes and learn to fix them. I treat my homelab like a Small Office/Home Office just so I can exercise some best practices that I might see in the real world. I also get a dopamine kick when I get things working, running, and stable. I feel proud for having figured something out.
You will know if you need a homelab or not. And you will know how simple or how complicated it should be. Some people might want to build a small AD environment with a few hosts and learn how to manage an on-prem environment, while others might just want a place to test their personal scripts. Either way, a homelab is a homelab, no matter how big or how small.
What’s in my Homelab
Okay, enough talk. Here’s a very brief overview of what I have running in my homelab.
On-prem
At home, my homelab looks like:
- OPNsense for my router/firewall
- A 1GbE, 24 port Cisco C1000 as my primary switch
- A 10GbE, 8 port Mikrotik CRS309 as a high speed switch for my Proxmox cluster
- A 3-node Proxmox cluster with Ceph shared storage
- A Synology DS923+ for backups and other small services
Not On-prem
- Cloudflare for many reasons (domain registrar, proxy, all things Cloudflare…)
- AWS to host this site via EKS
Time to lab
A homelab can be as complicated as a small data center in someone’s garage, or as simple as an environment to work on your project. Throughout this site, I will go into more details about components of my homelab, how the setup looks, issues I am currently facing, and more.
I hope this site can give you some insight into what a homelab is, how it can be used, and give you some ideas about projects you might want to try on your own.
