A personal infrastructure lab, built one phase at a time in a two-bedroom apartment on a ~$100/month budget. The goal is to run a scaled-down mirror of the systems I work with professionally: virtualization, shared storage, network segmentation, Kubernetes, identity, monitoring, and IaC/CI-CD, so I have a place to practice, break things, and build resume-relevant depth outside of work hours. This page tracks the plan and will fill in with real builds, configs, and screenshots as each phase lands.
I run enterprise virtualization, storage, and monitoring platforms at work, but I don't get to touch every layer of the stack, things like firewall policy, cluster bootstrap from scratch, or identity infrastructure. This lab exists to close that gap. It's split into two tiers that intentionally never share a failure domain: an appliance tier for things the household actually depends on (media server, file sync), and a lab tier I'm free to break: virtualization cluster, Kubernetes, Active Directory, security tooling. Everything is planned around apartment-friendly constraints: no new cable runs, gear that fits on a wire shelf instead of a rack, and a hardware budget that favors small, quiet, low-power boxes over anything loud or power-hungry.
Rough phase order, prioritized so the day-to-day quality-of-life wins (streaming, cloud storage, cameras) land before the career-focused infrastructure work.
Plex on the desktop plus a Sonarr/Radarr/qBittorrent automation stack in Docker: the current, informal starting point ahead of a proper storage build-out.
Stand up a dedicated NAS on TrueNAS SCALE with ZFS pools, migrate Plex media and a self-hosted Nextcloud onto it over NFS, and retire the streaming and cloud-drive subscriptions it replaces.
A managed switch and an OPNsense firewall/router with VLAN segmentation (management, trusted, servers, lab, IoT/cameras, guest) and Suricata IDS: the backbone every later phase depends on.
Local RTSP/ONVIF IP cameras feeding a self-hosted Frigate NVR, isolated on their own VLAN with no internet egress, replacing subscription camera services.
A three-node Proxmox VE cluster with shared storage from the NAS, hosting a kubeadm Kubernetes cluster built (and rebuilt) for CKA prep, plus Windows Server VMs for Active Directory and SCCM.
Layer on GitLab CI/CD, IaC with Terraform/OpenTofu, secrets management, a Grafana/Prometheus/Loki monitoring stack on the cluster, and a small, budget-capped AWS footprint for IAM, Route53, and S3 backup practice.
Part of the point of this lab is deliberately mirroring the categories of tooling I use professionally with a self-hosted, mostly free equivalent.
| At Work | At Home | Why |
|---|---|---|
| VMware vSphere | Proxmox VE | Clustering, HA, live migration, shared storage |
| OpenShift | kubeadm Kubernetes | Vanilla cluster bootstrap for CKA prep |
| Vast / Pure arrays | TrueNAS SCALE + ZFS | NFS/iSCSI/SMB exports, snapshots, replication |
| Palo Alto | OPNsense + Suricata | Zones, policy, NAT, IDS/IPS, VPN |
| Active Directory / SCCM | Windows Server + MECM eval | Free evaluation editions, rebuilt on expiry |
| Rubrik | Proxmox Backup Server + Veeam CE | Real backup/restore workflow, not just snapshots |
| Grafana / Prometheus / Loki / Alloy | The identical stack, self-hosted | Same components and config as the OpenShift project |
| Cisco switches | Used Catalyst 2960 | Real IOS CLI on the same vendor gear |
| M365 / OneDrive | Nextcloud | Self-hosted file sync and sharing |
Nothing to show yet beyond the current Docker stack. This section will fill in with real dashboards, configs, and rack photos as each phase is actually built.