Building a home lab network I have found is a pretty exciting project. But it comes with some real decisions that can make or break your setup that I have found.
I'm curious about the pain points you're facing in your home lab infrastructure. I am wondering if others are struggling with the following things that I have seen as possible challenges for me:
- VLAN segmentation and inter-VLAN routin
- DNS/DHCP management across multiple subnets
- connectivity decisions (10GbE vs 25GbE vs staying with 1GbE)
- Firewall rules
- WiFi coverage and performance tuning
- Network monitoring and visibility tools
- Balancing performance with power consumption
One thing I've learned is that home labs are pretty customized to each person and what they are doing. While someone else needs enterprise-grade features others may not. The design choices we make often come down to each specific use case. Man, budgets are also a common worry as well especially these days.
I'd love to hear about your setup, the design decisions that worked well, and what you might want to wait and do differently if you started today? Did you go with managed switches for better control, or stick with simpler unmanaged solutions? Are you using WireGuard for remote access, or did you choose a different VPN approach?
Sorry for all the questions, but just wanted to put this out there for the community to weigh in on.
Tim,
Absolutely, I think you have encapsulated a lot of the really unique and cool things about a home lab in general. They are very unique to each person and to each learning path. What might be important to one person in their learning might not be important to another. I do thing there are best practices that I have written about quite a bit with blog posts and other information. Let me take a stab at some of what you have mentioned here:
- VLANs (less is more) - Only create the VLANs you need. Create routes for those VLANs you want to be able to communicate.
- I currently use a combination of DHCP configurations combining both my firewall that hands out some IPs and a Windows Server DHCP server that hands out others. But this is also dependent on the needs of each person and address spaces.
- Firewall rules - Again these are subjective to what you want to accomplish. You can have filtering between VLANs you DON'T want to communicate and those that you DO want to communicate.
- Wifi is something I am constantly tuning and tweaking. But, make sure you have enough coverage with your APs. Having the right density/wrong density, is hard to overcome.
- Absolutely have networking monitoring in place. I use a combination of things. Uptime Kuma provides the basic and arguably my most important quick alert if something is down. But I use Pulse and other tools for Proxmox specific monitoring.
- Using mini PCs number one is the best way I think to have a great balance of performance and efficiency. You can also play around with things like Core Performance Boost (turning this off or on) depending on your needs. This one setting can cut your power consumption literally in half.
Definitely go with a managed switch in the beginning, even if the cost is a bit more. This way you are setup and ready for VLAN configuration when the time is right and you will already have the features you need. I use Twingate for remote management as they have a free tier. But you can do similar with Wireguard, Tailscale, Pangolin and other solutions out there.
Hopefully some of this helps!
Brandon
The answer is yes…. I am struggling with it all. Hahahaha! I have two comps set up with Proxmox in a cluster. One is for cloud services and the other is my NAS and test ground with SAS drives and Proxmox Backup server. I have an old router i put OpenWRT on and now I can’t get tailscale to run. Im trying to workout the firewall settings but no success yet. Plus Nextcloud keeps breaking. I have everything setup on a gigabit switch. Lots things to figure out, but lots of fun/knowledge.
@roblewis awesome stuff! You are in the midst of figuring out things that will absolutely transform your learning with a home lab. I look back at where you are fondly as we have all been there, but these are the kinds of things that help shape us and make us better as we go along. Don't hesitate to reach out, create a forum post if you need to talk through anything you might be having problems with 👌
Brandon