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.


Unifi UDM Pro
The UDM Pro is my main firewall/network appliance taking care of my DHCP, traffic rules, mutliple VPN instances, firewall rules and site-to-site VPN.
Multiple vLANs are set up using the network controller software to secure IoT devices away from my main network and also acts as my main NVR for my 3 Unifi cameras.

USW-8-60W
This little switch has been through it all with everything I have asked it to do over the past 5 years. The switch will be replaced in 2025 at some point with a bigger PoE switch.
8 ports has been enough for my network for the past few years but t he limitation is the 4 included PoE ports that can only deliver 60W of power that is running at 90%.

Unifi Nano-HD
The majority of device on my network do not run wireless so moving up to WiFi6 or 7 is not really required but coverage is becoming a problem currently.
The HD-Nano is a smaller version of the AC-Pro and for extra coverage it will be paired with a U6-Mesh in the future. I currently broadcast 3 SSIDs on separate vLANs.

Proxmox VE
To virtualise and manage my current services, containers and virtual machines, Proxmox VE was the best choice.
Using Proxmox for several years, I am very familiar with how the virtualisation works.
The cluster runs 2 nodes which splits my services over 2 different devices for some sortt of redundancy and each are backed up using Veeam to my NAS for easy restore in the event of a failure.

Optiplex 3070
The main and first node on my cluster is a Dell Optiplex MFF 3070 featuring an Intel i5-9600T, 32GB DDR4 RAM, 128GB boot SSD and 500GB storage NVMe SSD.
With 6 cores/threads this has been more than powerful enough for the past year or so.
This node holds my main DNS server, Home Assistant, knowledge base and some other services that I rely on for day to day running of the network.

Optiplex 3040
Serving as my backup node for other services such as backup DNS, network monitoring, home dashboard and other services, this little node has been rock solid.
Featuring an Intel i5-6600T, 24GB DDR4 RAM, 128GB boot SSD and 500GB NVMe SSD for storage, this device has a savior recently in the event of an SSD failure in my main node.
Restoring from backup onto this node was essential to keep my network up.
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.