For the longest time, my "home lab" was less of a lab and more of a digital pile of laundry. I had multiple services running across all sorts of random hardware. If something went down, it was a scavenger hunt to figure out which device was hosting it, let alone why it had failed. I never really knew what was what, or where to look when things went wrong.
I decided it was time to stop treating my network like a science experiment gone wrong and actually build something reliable.
1 Phase 1: Cleaning Up the Network
The first step was stabilizing the backbone. You can't host services if your network is flaky. I picked up a Unifi Dream Router 7, along with a few Unifi managed switches and access points.
I could see clients, manage traffic, and actually trust the WiFi. Naturally, once the network was stable, the itch to host more things kicked in. I wanted a web server to test apps and pages I was building for work, but I didn't want to just clutter up my personal laptop.
2 Phase 2: Enter Proxmox (Thanks, Mathias)
A friend, Mathias, suggested I look into Proxmox. I started small with a simple mini-PC. Honestly? It just worked. Spinning up LXC containers and VMs was addictive. I named this node PVE1.
3 Phase 3: The GPU Hurdle & The Gaming Rig Resurrection
I tried to expand the capabilities of the mini-PC, but I hit a wall fast. I ran into some "fun" issues involving kernel panics, which turned out to be a conflict between specific Proxmox versions and the supported iGPUs.
I needed a different approach—something with more raw power. I looked over at my gaming PC, gathering dust in the corner. Plenty of RAM, decent storage, and a dedicated GPU.
I wiped it and reformatted it as PVE2. Now I had a cluster: a low-power mini-PC for 24/7 lightweight services, and a beastly gaming rig for the heavy lifting.
The Current Stack
With the hardware sorted, I’ve settled into a really comfortable software stack running across the cluster:
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Proxmox PVE1 & PVE2 Hypervisor Layer
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PiHole Ad blocking & DNS
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HomeAssistant Smart home brain
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Docker Test Server Sandbox for work projects
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VictoriaMetrics & VictoriaLogs The observability backend
Seeing What's Actually Happening
The real game-changer lately has been VictoriaLogs. I’m scraping logs from everything—the hypervisors, the containers, the apps—and importing them into VictoriaLogs.
It is making it genuinely fun to see what is happening on my network. Instead of guessing why a service is slow or why a connection dropped, I can just query the logs. It turns the invisible background noise of the network into actionable data.
What's Next?
The lab is never "done," but for the first time, I feel like I have a platform rather than a pile of parts. If you are on the fence about moving from bare metal or random Raspberry Pis to a hypervisor like Proxmox, take the leap. Just maybe keep a spare gaming PC handy, just in case.
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