Three old workstations, a cheap managed switch, and a weekend. That’s how the homelab started.
Why Bother
Cloud is convenient until the bill arrives. Running your own infrastructure teaches you things that managed services deliberately hide — storage I/O, network latency, kernel tuning. More importantly, you can break it without consequences.
Hardware
I picked up three ex-corporate workstations for under €100 each. Dual-core Xeons, 32 GB ECC RAM, spinning disks I later replaced with SSDs. Not impressive on paper, but more than enough to run a Proxmox cluster, a NAS, and a handful of VMs simultaneously.
Proxmox
Proxmox VE is the hypervisor. It runs on Debian, exposes a clean web UI, and gets out of your way. Each node joined the cluster in under ten minutes.
The first lesson: always set up a separate management VLAN before you start moving VMs around. I didn’t, and spent an afternoon locked out of my own cluster.
Network
A managed switch was non-negotiable. VLAN segmentation from day one: management, trusted, IoT, guest. Flat networks are fine until they aren’t.
The router runs OPNsense on a small appliance. Firewall rules are explicit — default deny, everything else is intentional.
What’s Running
- Three Proxmox nodes in a cluster
- TrueNAS VM for storage (ZFS mirror)
- Several Debian VMs for services
- Monitoring via Grafana + Prometheus
What’s Next
Ceph for distributed storage, Kubernetes on top of the VMs, and eventually the whole thing defined in Terraform so a full rebuild is one command.