The current diagram of my homelab.

It may not be a lot to look at, but I have put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into this network. Literally blood, I have cut my fingers open on these so many times.

The network consists of mainly new and used hardware and open source software to keep costs down to a minimum which includes Ubiquiti for networking & CCTV, Dell OptiPlex MFF devices as a Proxmox cluster and Linux for open source services such as Pi-Hole, Home Assistant and apache web servers for services I use on the daily.

This all sits in a 22U comms cabinet in my front room.

Ubiquiti Networking
Virtualisation

Services has been moved to its own page

Why choose consumer hardware?

Not wanting to hike up my electricity bill, it was essential to find hardware that is easy to run, easy to upgrade/replace in the event of a failure and not be too tasking on my electric meter.

Dell/HP/Lenovo MFF devices are cheap, use little electric due to the T series CPUs and cheap enough to replace or upgrade down the line if needed.

vLANs - How many and why so many?

Currently I run 5 vLANs on my internal network, each with a different role and set up in different ways.

The 2 main networks are my main network and a guest network for friends.

There is also an IoT network to keep my IoT device separate and 2 VPN servers with traffic rules in the controller software only allowing certain VPN connections through to certain services.

Why choose Ubiquiti over others?

Using Ubiquiti is an absolute no brainer for me.

The Unifi Controller and Protect apps are graphically really nice to use and have a friendly interface.

The network controller gives easy managability without having to go through the menu after menu of enterprise class firewalls and switches and Unifi Protect just works out of the box.

What's down the line for your lab?

More and more nodes for Proxmox!

I have a habit of finding a project, setting it up, finding out I don't need it and deleting it but documenting it in the process.

Next steps is to add a new, larger 16 port PoE switch and a new AP for coverage.

New services mind? Unsure, looking into what I want to run currently and what is out there.