Going Overboard with My Homelab

My homelab is certainly more elaborate than necessary, but that's because I love to tinker. It's one of my hobbies, and truth be told, my lab's main purpose is just that—being a hobby. While some components are genuinely useful, the overall setup is delightfully over the top.

The main parts of the lab are:

• A 3-node Proxmox cluster that runs VMs

• An 8-node Ceph cluster that provides primary storage

• Two separate NAS appliances that serve as backup targets (one of which I plan to move off-site)

• A Ubiquiti network with an OPNsense firewall/router and a Tailscale overlay network connecting most servers

• A Unifi Protect security camera system combined with Scrypted in a VM to make cameras available to Apple HomeKit

• Home Assistant in a VM

• A VM dedicated to Generative AI tinkering

• Many containerized applications in a 3-node Docker Swarm cluster

This is the start of a series of posts where I will dig into the details a few of these and give some perspective on why I ended up with the current state. In the meantime, here is a general overview diagram of what things look like as of May 2024: