Where old enterprise hardware, home networking and questionable ideas get another life. 😄
What started as a few computers and a home network has gradually become a small lab for experimenting with servers, virtualization, networking, storage and automation.
Some of the hardware is new. Some of it has been given a second life. And some of it probably consumes more electricity than I should admit.
After years of managing VMware and data-center infrastructure professionally, some of that enterprise technology eventually followed me home.
A retired Dell VxRail server now runs Proxmox, ZFS storage and virtual machines — hardware that once lived in a data center getting an entirely different second career.
The lab isn't just servers. It's also the network connecting everything together: UniFi switching and Wi-Fi, multiple VLANs, internal DNS, isolated IoT and guest networks, monitoring, automation and the inevitable Raspberry Pi.
Most of it exists for one reason: I like understanding how all the pieces fit together.
The Lab is never really finished. Hardware changes, software gets replaced, experiments succeed, experiments fail — and there's always another idea waiting on the list.