I have been running a homelab for about six years now, and it has slowly evolved from “one server under the desk” to… well, a slightly more beefy server under the desk. No fancy rack yet, just chaos beneath my gaming setup. But hey, it hopefully delivers what I want to accomplish.

Here is what I am running these days.

The New Beast: Dell Precision 7820

I recently got my hands on a Dell Precision 7820 Tower, and it is a bit overkill???? for a homelab. But that is kind of the point, right?

  • CPU: Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6234 @ 3.30GHz (16 cores total)
  • RAM: 384 GB DDR4
  • GPU: NVIDIA RTX 6000 24GB GDDR6
  • Hypervisor: ESXi

Why this much power? I wanted to lab with the big stuff, VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x, nested Cisco Nexus 9000v switches, that kind of thing. My old server was just too old to even think about running any of that.

The Old Workhorse: HP ProLiant ML310e Gen8 v2

For the past six years, this little guy has been my playground. 32GB of RAM does not sound like much anymore, but it taught me a lot.

It started out as a simple homelab server, but over time it became a place where I could test, break, rebuild and understand things properly.

On this server I learned:

  • Home Assistant for smart home stuff
  • Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Overseerr — the full arr-stack
  • Custom Discord bots for notifications and small proof-of-concept automations
  • Windows Server domain controllers and Active Directory labs
  • Internal DNS, DHCP and basic enterprise network services
  • Hybrid identity scenarios with Azure
  • SAML authentication testing and troubleshooting
  • Docker-based services and container networking
  • Small test environments for work-related scenarios

A lot of the value came from being able to create and test things I worked with professionally. If I needed to understand how something behaved, I could build a small version of it at home first. Windows domains, authentication flows, hybrid Azure setups, DNS issues, certificates, reverse proxies, containers.

It has helped me more than I expected in real customer work. Having a place where I can safely test ideas for customers, validate assumptions and troubleshoot without consequences has been one of the most useful parts of the whole setup.

It has been the perfect “break things and learn” environment.

Networking Gear

Nothing too crazy here, but it gets the job done:

  • Firewall: Fortigate 40F — solid little box for home use
  • Access Points: 2x UniFi U6 Lite — great coverage
  • Switches: 2x Ubiquiti UniFi Switch 8-Port PoE (60W, managed)

Those UniFi 8-port PoE switches are sadly discontinued, which is a shame because I love them. I have looked at the newer UISP Switch line as a replacement, but honestly, I will keep using these until they die.

Network Setup

I am currently running 24 VLANs on ESXi, 3 WLAN’s. No fancy micro-segmentation yet, just good old VLANs keeping things separated. Though I have been eyeing Illumio to play with zero-trust segmentation at home. I am sure i will get a post on it rather soon :)

What is Running Right Now

On a Ubuntu VM, I have got a few Docker containers doing the heavy lifting:

  • Technitium DNS — handling all internal DNS
  • UniFi Controller — managing the APs and switches
  • Nginx — simple reverse proxy for internal services
  • Custom notification containers — pushing alerts to ntfy (more on this in a future post)

And on rest of the ESXi:

  • VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 — nested lab for learning VCF (holodeck)
  • EVE-NG — network simulation for labbing Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto and whatever else I want to break

This Website

Speaking of homelab projects — this website is one of them. I recently ditched WordPress and rebuilt the whole thing using Astro, a static site generator.

The setup is stupidly simple and I love it:

  • Code: Astro + Markdown, hosted on GitHub
  • Hosting: Cloudflare (free)
  • Comments: Giscus (uses GitHub Discussions)
  • SSL: Free, automatic via Cloudflare

The workflow is beautiful. I write a blog post in Markdown, push it to GitHub via VS Code, and Cloudflare automatically builds and deploys the site within 30 seconds. No FTP, no manual uploads, no security issues to worrie about, no operational tasks. Just write and push.

If you are still running WordPress for a simple blog or portfolio, do yourself a favor and look into static site generators. Simplisity and security with no operation is just golden.

What is Next?

I have got plans. Too many plans, probably?

  • More EVE-NG labs with proper topology diagrams
  • Playing with Illumio for micro-segmentation
  • Maybe actually building a proper rack setup (we will see)
  • Writing more posts about what is done in the past

Check back later for more posts about EVE-NG labs, network automation, etc.

Got questions about my setup? Drop a comment below, I would love to hear what you are running in your homelab too.