Hey everyone, Brandon here. I thought it would be fun to kick off something new for the community as we wrap up 2025 and head into another year of home lab madness.
It has been an absolutely wild year for home lab gear. Between the surge of Mini PCs, ARM boxes showing up in places none of us expected, NVMe hoarding, GPU passthrough on every node we can cram one into, and the never ending Proxmox vs ESXi vs everything else debates, we have all been building, tearing down, rebuilding, and optimizing our labs nonstop.
So let’s see what you’ve been up to.
This new topic is your place to show off your Best Home Lab Server Pics and Gear in 2025. Whether your setup is a full server rack humming in the corner, a stack of Minisforum boxes with Ceph, a DR cluster stretched between rooms, a pile of Raspberry Pis running Kubernetes, a cable-management masterpiece, or the most chaotic spaghetti rack ever built, we want to see it.
Share:
• What your setup looks like now
• What you added or removed in 2025
• Any upgrades you’re planning going into 2026
• A short description of your design, your goals, or the story behind your home lab
• Bonus points for photos of before and after evolution shots
This community is at its best when we all learn from each other’s builds. Half the time inspiration comes from seeing someone else’s approach to storage, airflow, VLAN design, clustering, or even how they zip-tie cables. So jump in and start posting your pictures. Comment on other builds. Ask questions. Steal ideas. Improve your own setup.
And… I’ll just say this…
It might be worth posting your gear photos sooner rather than later. I’m working on something fun that will drop soon, and let’s just say someone who posts in this topic may end up getting something cool for their 2026 home lab plans. More on that later.
Can’t wait to see your setups! Let’s make this the biggest and most inspiring gear thread on the forum this year.
- Brandon