When I look at the home labs of all the IT nerds, I run a very small lab at home. If it’s up to my family and friends, I have a lot of equipment lying around.

But first see for yourself:

  • The network infrastructure consists of switches, access points and routers from Ubiquiti (UniFi). The access points are supplied with power via PoE.
    • The network itself is divided into different areas with VLANs: Management, Home LAN, Smart Home WLAN, Guest WLAN, as well as dedicated network elements for company devices. Two dedicated VLANs are also available for the Homelab. These are routed via a separate router/firewall.
  • There is also a small server infrastructure in the basement at home. This consists of
    • Two Intel NUC (Gen 7 and 10), Minisforum MS-01 => 36vCPUs, 156gb RAM, in total 4tb SSD/NVmE. Proxmox is currently running on these as a hypervisor
    • 4x RPi IV form a Kubernetes cluster that runs a reverse proxy and ArgoCD in addition to the central DNS servers for Home, Homelab and Cloudlab
  • Which services are available in the Homelab/Home:
    • Authentik -Central authentication for all web applications
    • Gitea – internal GIT Repo / Container Registry
    • GitHub-Runner
    • Uptime Kuma
    • vscode-Server
    • Kestra – Automation Platform
    • Portainer -Manager for different Docker hosts
    • Immich – Central collection point for all pictures
    • InfluxDB and different data collectos
    • MikroTik CHR
  • and very important
    • Home Assistant – for the home automation

Due to my job and the resulting increased interest in cloud technologies, the Home/Lab was also connected to various cloud providers – AWS, Hetzner and a private cloud provider. Here I used WireGuard for simplicity. (This is also how my devices connect to the home lab)