Homelab

Friday 17 January 2025

My longest ongoing project by far

Homelabprod

I'm always hesitant to call my "homelab" a "lab", as that isn't really how it gets used. The services running are ones that me (and occasionally my family) use regularly. In other words, it would be annoying if they went down. To that effect, while talking to some colleagues I named it "HomeProd". This page serves to document the basics. What's here, and how things are wired up.

This diagram shows the Physical layout of the main rack. It's pretty simple.

The main machine running everything is a HP Microserver Gen 8. In 2025 it's definitely a little on the older side with a Xeon E3 and 16 GiB of RAM, but it continues to be just enough for what I need. I run Proxmox VE and have around 3 TiB of storage, split such that 2 TiB is used for storage, and the remainder for backups of important VMs. There is also a 512 GiB SSD for Proxmox itself and the boot disks of all my VMs.

Alongside this, I have an Intel NUC which is much less powerful than the Microserver but serves as a second Proxmox node to offload any VMs or Containers that I really don't want to go down. This affords me the ability to have the Microserver shut down as soon as the UPS drops onto battery power, almost doubling it's runtime. It also means I can break things on the Microserver without taking down the Internet I rely on to work.

The network is split up into 5 VLANs, which are currently all routed through pfSense. Ideally, somewhere down the line I'd like to switch over to a layer 3 switch for efficiency sake but for now, pfSense is coping with the tiny amount of extra load, and the extra round trip to the router isn't impacting latency too much.

I'll leave this as a super brief overview for now as I intent to write in more detail about what's running and how it's used.

Hardware

Compute

Network

Power

Services