# 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](https://www.proxmox.com/) cluster that runs VMs
    
* An 8-node [Ceph](https://ceph.io/) 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](https://ui.com/) network with an [OPNsense](https://opnsense.org/) firewall/router and a [Tailscale](https://tailscale.com/) overlay network connecting most servers
    
* A [Unifi Protect](https://ui.com/camera-security) security camera system combined with [Scrypted](https://www.scrypted.app/) in a VM to make cameras available to Apple HomeKit
    
* [Home Assistant](https://www.home-assistant.io/) 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:

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1736723637696/3479ef28-8af5-4eeb-befe-ec97ac192cf1.png align="center")