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: