Hardware in my Home Lab

What is in my Home Lab

I’ve built my home lab into a small rack which is designed to help me with virtualisation, networking and different self-hosted services.

The goal of the environment is to simulate real-world infrastructure design to help me learn and understand different services, this also runs in my bedroom so is designed with space and noise in mind.

Rack Infrastructure

The lab is housed in a compact rack which contains:

• Multiple virtualisation hosts used for running infrastructure workloads and test environments
• OPNSense firewall and router
• Managed switching for internal network connectivity
• Patch panels for structured cabling
• Rack power distribution units

Supporting Devices

In addition to core rack equipment, the lab also includes:

• A Phillips Hue Hub, used for home automation integrations and experimentation
• A NAS enclosure on the floor next to the rack for VM backups and data storage