Homelab

Updated: May 13, 2026

The homelab is in three pieces: a compact 10-inch rack and a full-size rack at home, plus a 19-inch rack offsite for backups and the occasional service that earns the trip. Each rack is small enough to fit in a corner, big enough to do real work.

HOMELAB FLEET — three racks across two sites

  HOME · 10" rack
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  HP EliteDesk mini  ── Proxmox node          │
  │  HP EliteDesk mini  ── Proxmox node          │
  │  HP EliteDesk mini  ── Proxmox node          │
  │  switch                                      │
  │  switch                                      │
  │  Raspberry Pi       ── Home Assistant        │
  │  Raspberry Pi       ── Pi-hole               │
  │  Cyberpower UPS                              │
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

  HOME · full rack  (wall pass-through to office)
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  Main PC  (rackmounted; head lives next room)│
  │  switch                                      │
  │  Synology DS  (8 bays)  ── storage + backup  │
  │  OPNsense router        ── perimeter / VLANs │
  │  Eaton 2U UPS                                │
  │  Eaton 2U UPS                                │
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

  OFFSITE · 19" rack
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  Dell R720                                   │
  │  Dell R210 ii                                │
  │  HP EliteDesk mini  × N                      │
  │  switch                                      │
  │  APC UPS                                     │
  │  APC UPS                                     │
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Proxmox

The Proxmox cluster runs on the HP EliteDesk Minis in the 10-inch rack — three nodes, small footprint, quiet enough to live in a room I also work in. [REPLACE — what runs on it: which VMs are pinned where, HA group config, any LXC vs full-VM splits, why this hypervisor over the alternatives.] The thing I appreciate most is how unremarkable it is day-to-day; the cluster does what it’s supposed to and stays out of the way.

Synology

The 8-bay Synology in the full-size rack is the storage core — bulk file shares, the photo library, and the first hop of the 3-2-1 backup strategy. [REPLACE — pool topology (SHR-1 / SHR-2 / RAID-6), total capacity, what’s stored vs what’s just cached, snapshot policy, how it ties into the offsite rack.] I’ve gone back and forth between rolling my own NAS and buying an appliance; the Synology wins on the time I don’t spend tuning it.

Nextcloud

Nextcloud is the Dropbox-replacement layer — file sync across desktops and phones, with calendar and contacts riding along. [REPLACE — where it runs (Proxmox VM or LXC; reverse-proxy story; storage backed by Synology over NFS or local disk), which mobile clients matter, what got migrated off third-party clouds and what stayed.] The migration off hosted file sync was less painful than I expected; the steady-state operational cost has been lower than I expected too.

Plex + *arr stack

Plex serves the media library, with the *arr family of helpers managing the catalog around it. [REPLACE — which arrs are actually running (Sonarr / Radarr / Bazarr / Lidarr / Readarr — pick the real subset), where they’re hosted (Proxmox LXC or VM), how transcoding is handled (hardware accel?), library size, who’s allowed in.] The setup is well-trodden territory; the part that’s mine is mostly the boundary between what I curate by hand and what I let the automation handle.

OPNsense

OPNsense is the perimeter — routing, firewall, VLAN segmentation, and a couple of things it does better than the appliance routers I owned before it. [REPLACE — VLAN topology (IoT vs trusted vs guest vs management vs DMZ — whatever the actual split is), upstream link details, any VPN endpoints (WireGuard / OpenVPN), why OPNsense over pfSense or a Unifi appliance.] It’s the piece of the lab I touch most when I want to teach myself something new about networking, partly because the consequences of misconfiguring it are immediate and educational.

The offsite rack does the boring, important work: pull backups off the Synology, retain a few months of snapshots, run a couple of services that benefit from not being on the home WAN. The redundancy is more than strictly necessary¹ — but the cost of “more than strictly necessary” turns out to be cheap, and the day the home power feed goes weird is the day I’m glad about every UPS in the diagram above.