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🏠 Home Lab Overview

My home lab is a fully featured technical environment designed to sharpen skills in systems engineering, automation, DevOps, and modern infrastructure management. It simulates a production-grade ecosystem using industry-standard tools, allowing me to design, test, and refine solutions across virtualization, orchestration, authentication, and CI/CD.

Built on a clustered Proxmox environment, the lab integrates automated provisioning, centralized identity, infrastructure-as-code, high-availability services, and modern authentication. It mirrors enterprise technologies while serving as a personal platform for continuous learning.

🖥 Virtualization & Infrastructure

A multi-node Proxmox Virtual Environment cluster hosts both Linux and Windows workloads. Key features include:

  • Standardized Ubuntu 24.04 VM templates via cloud-init
  • Automated provisioning with Ansible
  • Docker-based application deployment where containerization is appropriate
  • Seamless integration with the home network for reliability

This foundation enables production-like services and experimentation with new technologies.

🔐 Identity & Authentication

Identity and access management is modeled on enterprise practices:

  • Windows Server 2022 Active Directory Domain Controller
  • LDAP integration for compatible services
  • Migration toward unified Single Sign-On using Microsoft Entra ID as an OAuth2 identity provider

This setup supports testing of authentication workflows, identity federation, and authorization patterns.

💾 Storage & Backup

Multiple storage backends simulate real-world architectures:

  • Local SSDs for performance-critical workloads
  • Ceph distributed storage cluster
  • iSCSI volumes hosted on Synology NAS
  • NFS/Samba shares from TrueNAS

Backups are handled by Proxmox Backup Server, providing VM snapshotting, deduplication, and disaster recovery experience.

⚙️ Automation & Orchestration

Automation and reproducibility are central to the lab:

  • Ansible for provisioning, configuration, and deployment
  • Semaphore as a web interface for playbook execution
  • Terraform (driven through Ansible) for declarative infrastructure
  • Jenkins for CI/CD pipelines and automation workflows
  • GitHub Actions for cloud-based CI/CD and artifact automation

Together, these tools create a fully Infrastructure-as-Code environment aligned with modern DevOps practices.

💻 Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

The home lab is managed as Infrastructure-as-Code to ensure reproducibility, versioning, and maintainability:

  • Source Control: All Ansible code and configuration templates are stored in GitHub, enabling history tracking, code reviews, and collaboration.
  • Development Best Practices: Use tools such as Visual Studio Code and Code Server for editing and testing IaC locally or remotely. These tools support syntax highlighting, linting, and integrated terminal workflows.
  • Automated Provisioning: Ansible playbooks define VM templates, service deployments, and container orchestration in a consistent, repeatable manner.
  • Change Management: Any updates to playbooks or templates are committed to GitHub, providing an audit trail and rollback capability.

This approach ensures that every configuration change is trackable, testable, and reproducible, mirroring modern DevOps workflows.

🌐 Networking & Services

Networking is designed for high availability and resilience:

  • Nginx reverse proxy cluster for failover load balancing, centralized routing, and automated TLS via Let’s Encrypt
  • Redundant Pi-hole instances for DNS resolution, ad/telemetry filtering, and local service discovery

This mirrors production-style ingress, routing, and DNS management patterns.

📘 Project Management

Redmine serves as the central platform for organizing and documenting all aspects of the homelab.
Because this wiki is hosted directly inside Redmine, it benefits from:

  • Full project and task tracking across infrastructure components
  • Issue management for lab improvements, troubleshooting, and feature requests
  • Integrated documentation (this wiki) for architecture, configuration, and procedures
  • A local Git repository mirror for viewing Ansible code changes directly within Redmine

Explore the details here:

  • Redmine Configuration – How authentication, repositories, and system integration are configured within the homelab.

Redmine ties everything together—issues, documentation, and source code—providing a unified project management layer over the entire environment.

🎯 Why This Lab Matters

The home lab is more than an experiment—it’s a platform for continuous learning and hands-on practice with:

  • Clustered virtualization and systems administration
  • Identity and access management
  • Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code
  • CI/CD pipelines and DevOps tooling
  • Distributed storage and backup
  • Reverse proxying and certificate management
  • DNS and network services

It enables prototyping, troubleshooting, and staying current with modern infrastructure technologies.