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My Spiraling Journey into a Home Lab Setup

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Exploring the ins and outs of building a home lab setup from simple beginnings

If you’ve ever gotten curious about home tech, chances are you might have stumbled upon or even dreamed of building your own home lab setup. Well, let me take you through a story of how one home lab setup started small and then kind of totally spiraled out of control—but in a good way.

It all began with some simple equipment: a Synology NAS and Plex server, aiming just to stream media around the house. But once you get a taste of managing your own hardware and networks, things tend to grow—a lot. The journey from that humble start led to a setup involving some pretty serious components.

What’s in the Setup?

This home lab setup features some interesting gear that many tech enthusiasts can relate to:

  • A couple of Mikrotik switches (CRS326-24S+2Q+ and CRS328-24P-4S+) which handle the network backbone.
  • Several HDDs managed through ROSE, BTRFS, and RAID, mounted via NFS for efficient storage use.
  • A couple of Eaton UPS units (5P 550i and 5P 1550i) for power backup.
  • Synology RS822+ with an unofficial 10G NIC (though it’s planned to be phased out).
  • Mikrotik RDS-2216 with some nifty NVMe drives converted to SATA to use larger 3.5″ HDDs.
  • Also, a gaming console behind the setup just for fun (yes, there’s a PS5 lurking there).

Network and Storage Brains

The network runs with some fancy 802.3ad bonding, combining multiple links for impressive 20G throughput. The switches have Layer 3 hardware offloading, which boosts performance without extra CPU load. Interestingly, the setup opts out of VLANs, keeping things simpler at the network layer.

Storage and container management get handled with Kubernetes (K8s) in a Harvester cluster, featuring 3 masters for high availability. Each node is packed with NVMe boot drives and U.2 Longhorn storage, plus an extra NVMe drive for additional storage capacity.

Running the Services

Around 280 pods and 80 deployments run on this cluster. That includes the Harvester components themselves and a bunch of personal apps and containers. For media, Jellyfin runs on an NFS share, and backups (like Time Machine for Macs) also live here.

What Makes a Home Lab Setup Worth It?

You might wonder, why go through all this? There’s a real joy in building something that handles your personal data, media, backups, and apps on your own terms. Plus, if you’re into learning or working in IT, a home lab setup is a fantastic playground to test, break, and fix things without risking anyone else’s stuff.

Links to Check Out

  • If you want to explore similar network hardware, Mikrotik’s site is a solid resource: Mikrotik RouterOS.
  • Curious about Synology NAS options? Their official site covers models and specs: Synology DiskStation.
  • To dive deeper into Kubernetes clusters like Harvester, check out the official docs: Harvester.

Wrapping It Up

Building a home lab setup can be as simple or complex as you want. Mine was an experiment that grew bigger than I imagined but it’s rewarding to run a custom environment like this. Whether you want to dip your toes or go full throttle, there’s definitely value in having your own tech playground at home.

So, if you’re thinking about starting, just know it can start with one small device and grow into something quite spectacular. And that’s the beauty of home labs—no rules, just your vision and your setup.

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