Ever dream about your ultimate homelab with an unlimited budget? Explore a fantasy setup, from dual ISPs and fiber optics to redundant servers and massive storage.

A friend and I were chatting the other day, and we got onto one of our favorite topics: the “what if” game. What if time and money were just… not a thing? What would we do? My answer was immediate: I’d build the ultimate homelab.

It’s a fun thought experiment. Not just about buying the most expensive gear, but about designing a system from the ground up with no compromises. It would be a place to learn, to tinker, and to finally build all those cool projects that are rattling around in my head.

So, I thought it would be fun to map out exactly what this dream setup would look like.

The Foundation: A Purpose-Built Space

First things first, you can’t build a world-class lab in a dusty corner of the basement. My dream starts with the house itself. I’m talking about a dedicated space, actually, two of them.

• Dual Cooled Rooms: Two separate, climate-controlled rooms on opposite sides of the house. This provides physical redundancy. If one room has a cooling failure or a leak, the other side keeps humming along.
• Dual ISPs: I’d have two separate fiber internet connections from different providers. No more worrying about an outage taking down my whole setup. One goes down? The other takes over seamlessly.
• Solar and Battery Backup: The whole house would run on a solar roof with a significant battery array. This isn’t just about being green; it’s about clean, reliable power that’s independent of the grid.

The Network: A Flawless Digital Nervous System

With the physical foundation in place, the next layer is the network. I’m a big believer that a great lab is built on a great network.

• Fiber Everywhere: Forget standard Ethernet cables. In this dream scenario, I’m running fiber optic cables to every key point in the house. It’s incredibly fast, reliable, and future-proof.
• Ubiquiti Everything: I’d stick with Ubiquiti for my core networking gear. Their routers, switches, and access points offer a fantastic balance of power and usability.
• Proper Segmentation: This is where I’d finally have the time to do things right. I would meticulously set up VLANs to separate different types of traffic. For example, my core servers would be on a different network from my smart home devices, and guests would be on their own isolated network. Adding RADIUS authentication would mean only authorized devices could even connect. It’s the pro-level security you always mean to set up.

The Heart: Servers, Storage, and Redundancy

Now for the fun part: the servers and storage that would power everything.

• Redundant Proxmox Cluster: I use Proxmox to run my virtual machines, and in this lab, I’d have a high-availability cluster. That means if one server (or “node”) fails, the virtual machines automatically restart on another one. No downtime.
• The Data Hoard: Let’s be honest, every lab enthusiast has a bit of a data-hoarding problem. I’d solve it with two massive Synology HD6500 network-attached storage (NAS) units, filled to the brim with the largest hard drives I can find. One would be in my primary server room, and the identical twin would live at my parents’ house, acting as a complete, off-site backup. All my family photos, media, and important documents would be safe from almost any disaster.
• KVM Switches: A small but crucial detail. Instead of having a monitor and keyboard for every machine, a KVM switch would let me control any server in the rack from a single console. Clean and efficient.

The Command Center and Playground

What’s the point of having all this power if you can’t easily see what it’s doing and have some fun with it?

• The Dashboard: I’d have a large TV on the wall in my office acting as a dedicated dashboard. Using software like Grafana, it would display real-time stats for everything: network speed, server temperatures, storage capacity, internet status. It’s functional, but let’s be real, it would also just look incredibly cool.
• Raspberry Pi Cluster: I’ve always wanted to build a proper Raspberry Pi cluster. It’s not about raw power; it’s about having a dedicated, low-power environment to experiment with container orchestration like Kubernetes or just to run fun little scripts and services. It’s a sandbox for learning.
• Graceful Shutdown: Both racks would be connected to large Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS). If the main power (and solar) somehow failed, the UPS would keep everything running for a while. More importantly, it would signal all the servers to shut down gracefully before the batteries run out, preventing any data corruption.

Bringing it Back to Reality

It’s fun to dream, right?

But you don’t need two server rooms and a solar roof to have a great homelab. The spirit of a homelab isn’t about spending a fortune; it’s about the curiosity to learn, the satisfaction of building something yourself, and making the most of the gear you have. My first “server” was an old desktop computer, and I learned more from that than almost anything else.

Still, a guy can dream. Now I’m curious—what would your ultimate homelab look like?