Introduction

Hello everyone! I figured that I should start this website off with an introduction to my homelab and my general purpose for this website. I’ve been working on home lab projects for about 8 years now and I haven’t been writing any of it down. I figured I should start putting it somewhere while I learn so I can reference it later or share it with colleagues.

Please bear with me as I hope my formatting becomes better through more posts.

Breaking down my setup

My NAS

Currently I have a NAS running on an old Supermicro 12 bay dual-Xeon chassis. I use this server as both a home file server and NFS storage for my two virtualization servers. This server is running TrueNAS and it’s a tried and true OS that is extremely popular in home labs and for business. It’s incredibly powerful for storage management and also has the ability to run “jails” or small VMs if you wanted. There’s also a cloud sync feature which I use to sync my data to my Google Drive as an offsite backup.

Virtual Hosts

I have two Dell R610s that are running xcp-ng as a hypervisor that enable me to run multiple VMs that I’m able to spin up and use for learning. These hosts are managed by Xen Orchestra and this is a similar tool to VCSA on ESXI. I have actually recently switched from ESXi’s ecosystem as the support for version’s 6.5 and 6.7 has ended.

I have spent about 6 years working with vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 in my home lab and at work as a user. It’s a really robust tool and I can see why so many enterprises use it. This has been a great opportunity to hop over to a new system and learn some new skills! I’m planning on taking a deep dive into my process for managing these machines and what my production VMs look like.

Switching

I have my core networking for the lab running through a Cisco 3750 24 port POE switch. This thing is a layer 3 monster and has been an incredible asset for learning the Cisco OS and configurations. I currently don’t have any plans for any Cisco certs but it’s always been something that interests me.

Apart from the Cisco switch, I also have a MikroTik 4 port SFP switch that connects my NAS to my virtual hosts and it was a great investment as well. I don’t have to worry about my bandwidth being taken up by VMs constantly accessing their network storage and file transfers are ripping fast between hosts or VMs using that network.

Routing

Last but not least in the critical infrastructure of a home lab is the router. I use pfSense and have been for a long time. There’s so many features and packages that make it extremely powerful. Some of my favorite features are: Wireguard(via package) and OpenVPN support, DNS ad blocking(similar to pihole), HAProxy(via package), and Dynamic DNS.

This website

Last but not least, this website is currently hosted on the WordPress Docker container running in my lab! I was curious about learning docker and getting this website set up properly was a steep learning curve but I plan on writing about that on here as well.

SSL Encryption is brought to you by our friends over at Cloudflare. They have a great free tier for anyone that wants to self-host. You get free access to their DNS proxying and free wildcard SSL certificates! All you have to do is create an account on their website and transfer to them as your primary DNS providers. I will have a write-up on that later as well.