Project Homelab

Build a homelab that fits your space, your budget and your free time.

Project Homelab is a community guide to choosing and running the hardware, hypervisors, storage and networking that people use to learn IT at home. It’s written by homelabbers, for homelabbers, and it costs nothing to use.

Start planning your labWrite an article

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• Start hereWork out what you need, pick a lab style, and plan the build.
• HardwareServers, mini PCs, whiteboxes, cases and the parts that go in them.
• Housing your labRacks, power, cooling and keeping the noise down.
• StorageLocal disks, NAS, SAN, hyper-converged and storage software.
• NetworkingAddressing, 10Gb and InfiniBand, Wi-Fi and network gear.
• HypervisorsChoosing and running vSphere, Hyper-V, KVM, Proxmox and nested labs.
• ManagementRunning the lab day to day: access, automation, backups and patching.
• SecurityRemote access done safely, firewalls, antivirus and certificates.
• LicensingGetting legitimate lab licenses for Microsoft and VMware software.
• Cloud labsRunning some or all of your lab on someone else’s hardware.

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Every section of the guide, racked. Each drive bay is an article: complete, unfinished and looking for a writer.

New to homelabbing? Go in this order.

1. Work out your requirements

   Space, budget, noise, what you want to learn, and how often the lab will be on.

2. Pick a style of lab

   One host, a nested lab, a physical cluster, the cloud, or a mix.

3. Build it

   Compute, storage, networking, power and the hypervisor that ties it together.

4. Run it

   Backups, patching, monitoring and automation, mostly with free tools.

5. Lock it down

   Reach your lab from anywhere without opening it to the internet.

Written by the people who run the labs

Every page here started as someone’s notes from their own build. If you’ve racked a server, tamed a noisy fan or finally got VLANs working, that’s an article. Each page has an Edit page link that opens it on GitHub, and a maintainer reviews changes before they go live.

How to contributeAsk on the forumsSee the source