There’s something very satisfying about repurposing old hardware into a homelab that actually does something useful. A single Raspberry Pi in a closet or a full rack with proper networking gear - still a home lab!
We’d love to hear what your homelab setup actually looks like today and what workloads you’re throwing at it?
My journey started with replacing my ISP cable modem about ~ 7 years ago, over time it grew and grew.
My main platform is a proxmox/ceph cluster, running 2 containers and 20 VMs. They handle mail, dns, dhcp, database, network monitoring, etc.
There’s also a straight Debian 13 machine, doing ldap, nfs server, and acts as a guinea pig for various testing.
I also have a surprisingly stable FreeBSD server running an nfs server, a samba4 domain controller, a dns server and 6 VMs.
Oh, and a mini-x86_64 box running Debian 13, that does network backup.
I know, it’s a lot of hardware, but it sort of grew organically, one box at a time.
as of right now I just got the dell precision T7910 up and running I have ubuntu server on it, casaos and as of right now just jellyfin and currently moving all my video files into my 12TB raid now but hopefully next week i’ll get my other raid set up with ESXi or Proxmox to start working on my VMs
Very cool reading about what you’ve got going on. 26 VMs, do you run those services on a variety of linux distros?
I have a few projects going on, and when I need to do a project at work, I try it out in my home lab first. So I have VMs doing web, dns, dhcp, ntp, nfs DB servers, smtp, antispam, pop3 mailboxes, webmail, directory services, nagios, etc. Most of the machine are Debian, a few RHEL, and there’s Arch, OpenBSD and FreeBSD as well.
I’ve also got some debian containers out on the interwebs running game servers, while handling MX duties for several domains.
My home lab currently consists of three Raspberry Pis running a k3s (Kubernetes) cluster.
I’d like to share my documentation on this here soon.
Kubernetes is not something I’ve gotten into, but have been curious about what I could use it for. I have some spare Raspberry Pis laying around, would be very interested in what you post to see if it’s something I can learn from and/or set up on my network!
If you’re familiar with Linux and Docker, it’s quite easy to learn the basics
To get started quickly, straight on your PC, you could try Minikube or Rancher Desktop.
I’ve started a thread on this Kubernetes Homelab
I’m not running a homelab. Actually, I didn’t need one.
I have a Pi 4B (8GB) running DietPi OS, booting off a sata SSD, with Docker + Compose (was using Portainer before). I bought it a week before the Pi 5 was announced… 
I started with a cable modem and a RPI 2 back in the day also. Slippery slope!! You have been warned. 
I played with Kubernetes, back when it was all the rage. It’s interesting, but it seems to me mainly a tool for dynamically scaling up or down, and overkill for 99.9% of scenarios.
On the other hand, I found docker swarm to be powerful and practical. With docker compose and portainer, it’s a very nice solution for many use cases.
