Blinky Lights
I feel like everyone's homelabs go through some kind of a metamorphosis, like a precipice where you know what you need or you just out smart your current setup/storage/memory etc. This is one of those story(s)
2016
Purchased late in the night thanks to some cancer treatment related steroid-induced insomnia, I started the homelab journey with a brand new HP Microserver Gen 8 straight off Ebay. Did I have a clue what I was doing? Mostly no, but I could certainly install Vsphere 😅
2019: Floor Lab
What happens when you dip your toe into the unifi walled garden? You tend to buy more.
Synology NAS acting as just that, and the fan favourite still acting as my sandbox putting up with all sorts of rubbish with FreeNAS testing, OPSense testing, Vmware testing...just testing. Always testing. Of course there's the obligatory PI hole actually running on a Raspberry Pi.
Also 2019: R710 in a bedroom
This is the 'I don't know what I'm doing' chapter. Business grade rack computing...in a bedroom.
From the very first days of my IT Traineeship in 2013 after laying my teenage eyes on a real deal data center, I always wanted a bit of that. Mega RAM (96 something gigabytes of it), x2 CPUs and fans that spin up up like a fighter jet. Boy did I not need that in a bedroom not 5 meters away from where I slept. I did learn a bunch of stuff about IDRAC and using that to simmer the fans down but that's about it. Rack: Very overkill and not big enough. This setup didn't stick around for long (nor the R710). Certainly an expensive mistake 🤦♂️
2020: Nuc'ified
This is around the stage that I was finally 'getting it'. Maybe still enough to be dangerous, but getting 'better'. More importantly, the Microserver found it's true purpose as a NAS (Still FreeNAS at the time) Now loaded with 4x4tb, it was RAID time
The biggest thing here happens to be the 2x Intel NUC 10s. Two wasn't really required, but who could resist another if it was 40% off at the time? Both running Vmware (Well before the Broadcom shenenigans) Tonne of of stuff learnt there including managing vCenter, backups and failover. Also my first foray into Docker which is surely the greatest thing here.
2022: Rack em and stack em
New rack, new me (18u of it). The humble Microserver was relegated to backup duties now replaced by a ex-gaming machine turned Unraid server. 40TB (30 useable) meant I got to hoard all the things and finally have that much sort after 3 2 1 backup rule.
2025-26: The Endgame
That brings us to today; complete (For now at least). No longer dangerous knowledge wise and on a mostly sys-opy path. Stuff keeps changing; NUC's with way too many docker VM's now gone, now replaced with the 3x Rpi 4's running K3s Kubernetes. Instead of spinning stuff manually, I'm slipping into a habit of using Ansible and Git (Local Forgejo has been my favourite git thing thus far) which is been the most frustrating yet rewarding experiences yet.
Everything is monitored through a Prometheus setup that send metrics to Mimir in the cloud, then stores it back to 3x Garage S3 instances on the k3s cluster (Don't ask me if I remember how I wrangled that. I think the answer is 'just'), finally displaying it on an always changing Grafana dashboard. I monitor temps, volume sizes, up, down, birds (Birdnet is great) and planes (ADSB Dump1090 is also great). Hell, I even host this blog site on a Raspberry Pi 3B I purchased in 2015.
Honorable mentions of course for the gaming rig in a rack with the 'subtle' RGB to give me at least 3 extra FPS in my terminal and finally Microslop free (aside from that one Server 2025 VM running Veeam).
I'm very proud of my setup. It's now boring, mostly repeatable and looks damn fine if I say so myself.
It's been quite the journey over the last 10 years (with a lot of water under that bridge) seeing me through being a beginner to knowing enough to not be too dangerous. I'm hoping that someday both career and hobby align but until then, I guess I'll keep breaking things.