Beginner home lab essentials: from choosing your OS to managing Kubernetes and storage

If you’re diving into the world of a beginner home lab, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the options and setup decisions you need to make. I’ve recently been exploring this space myself, and I want to share some practical advice that I’ve gathered, focusing on a typical beginner home lab setup. This can be especially helpful if you’re moving from running everything on a laptop to something more dedicated and versatile like Kubernetes clusters.

Getting Started with Your Beginner Home Lab

Most beginner home lab enthusiasts start by gathering some simple but powerful hardware. A popular choice might be a NAS for storage, such as a Synology 16TB NAS with multiple drives, paired with compact mini PCs running Ryzen processors. These components offer a great balance between power and energy efficiency, which is important when running a lab at home.

Choosing the Right Base OS

One of the questions I faced was what base OS to use. Ubuntu Server is a solid, popular choice — it’s beginner-friendly and well-supported, especially when you want to run Kubernetes. Proxmox is another excellent option that adds virtualization and container capabilities out of the box, allowing you to run multiple VMs and containers easily. If you want flexibility in running various services and experimenting with virtual machines alongside Kubernetes, Proxmox could be worth the extra learning curve.

Kubernetes Flavor and Clustering

For running Kubernetes, the choice of “flavor” really depends on what you need. MicroK8s is great for beginners looking for something lightweight that just works on Ubuntu or other Linux distros. It also supports clustering, so you can link multiple nodes, which is handy for scaling your home lab.

There are other options like K3s, which is minimal and optimized for low-resource environments, but MicroK8s tends to be more feature-rich and beginner-friendly out of the box.

Storage Solutions for Your Home Lab

Storage can get tricky, especially when deciding how to integrate your NAS with Kubernetes. Longhorn is a cloud-native distributed block storage designed for Kubernetes, so it’s a good option if you want persistent storage managed within your cluster.

Can you use your NAS directly? Yes, but with some caveats. Many people use MinIO, which is an S3-compatible object storage server that can run on Kubernetes and integrate with your existing NAS for backups or object storage needs. It’s a flexible way to combine local NAS storage with your Kubernetes ecosystem.

Linking Multiple Clusters and Cloud Exposure

If you’re running Kubernetes clusters in different places — say, one in your home lab and one on your Mac using Orbstack — tools like Velero can help manage backups and migration of Kubernetes resources between those clusters.

Exposing your services securely to the internet is another common concern. Many home lab users rely on Cloudflare tunnels to safely access their Kubernetes services without opening ports directly on their home network. It’s a clever, secure approach to make your lab services accessible remotely.

Final Thoughts

Starting a beginner home lab is all about experimentation. Use hardware you trust, try out simple setups like MicroK8s on Ubuntu or explore Proxmox, and gradually build your stack with storage and networking solutions that fit your needs.

Here are some useful links to help you get started:
– Ubuntu Server
– Proxmox VE
– MicroK8s Documentation
– Longhorn Storage
– MinIO Object Storage
– Cloudflare Tunnel

Remember, your home lab should be a space where you learn and have fun with technology — there’s no one right way to do it. Start simple, adjust as you go, and enjoy the process!