Homelab Setup

Purpose

The purpose of my homelab is to allow me a safe environment for experimentation, learning, exploring, and testing new ideas, systems, and automations. Its a sandbox to host whatever resources I need or want. Below is an outline of the different VMs I have running and the resources I have dedicated to them.

Hostname	vCPUs	RAM (GB)	Storage (GB)
Plex Media	2	4	4000
Mattermost	2	4	20
UniFi Controller	2	2	16
Warpgate	2	2	16
Netbox	2	8	32
Hashicorp Vault	2	2	32
Actual Budget	2	2	32
OPNSense	8	16	1024
Checkmk	2	4	24
Grafana	2	2	10
Prometheus	2	4	64
Total:	28	50	5270

Principles of Homelabbing

My princicples to running and maintaining a homelab within a budget are as follows:

1. Least power needed
2. Least access needed
3. Full logging
4. Automate where possible
5. Document every step
6. Smallest footprint possible

These principles exist to simplify and secure my homelab. I want to keep the power consumption and risk low, while still providing the services I enjoy from my homelab. Therefore, good cybersecurity practices and use of tools such as Wake on Lan (WOL) are critical. VPNs, PKI, MFA, IPS, and other wonderful acronyms will allow homelab user experience to stay smooth and security to stay tight.