Most home lab guides assume you have enterprise hardware lying around, a dedicated breaker for your rack, and no electricity bill. My approach is… different.
I wanted something that would:
- Run Proxmox smoothly
- Handle containers + a few VMs
- Host personal services without becoming a furnace
- Fit within a normal-person budget
- Not sound like a jet engine
The Hardware
My current setup revolves around a Fractal Node 804 build paired with a Ryzen 7 5700G. Why?
- Integrated GPU = no need for a separate card
- Very efficient under low/medium loads
- Plenty of cores for containers
- Doesn’t try to melt the room
Storage sits on a ZFS pool, because snapshots and checksumming save your sanity eventually.
Services I Run
The non-negotiables:
- Nextcloud — the catch-all for documents
- Immich — because local photo hosting is the future
- Uptime Kuma — helps me know what broke before someone else does
- Unbound DNS — privacy + speed
- Home Assistant — slowly automating the house
Lessons Learned
- Not everything needs a VM — LXC containers are brilliant.
- Backups matter more than the shiny hardware.
- Noise drives you mad faster than performance limits.
- Start small. Expand only when you feel the constraint.
I’ll eventually write deep dives into storage, networking, and how everything is wired together. For now, this is a snapshot of where things stand.