Currently we have an Intel NUC running VMWare ESXI with 3 VM’s running.

Pihole for DNS filtering, HomeAssistant for automations and things, Hugo for my static site generation needs.

There is a TP-Link 5 port 1gig switch connecting everything together.

Since I have Google Wifi and make use of their hardware (it' scuffed) and one of the AP’s is treated as the “Router” for lack of a better term.

5 ports, 2 for the NUC (1 USB->Ethernet Adapter for redundancy since it’s used hardware?), one port for the “Router” and one for my Main PC. One is spare at the moment and will be used for the NAS once purchsed.

Additionally from there I have a second switch mounted to the wall behind my desk (Just a simple Netgear 5 port 1gig) with a loose cable hanging out for when I need to test machines.

Currently there is an HP Tower offline and my HP DL360 Gen 6 Server offline. I have stopped using the DL360 for TrueNas as the pool kept nuking itself after some bad power outages. (Always get a UPS guys! Thankfully it wasn’t important data!) I will be investing in an Asustor NAS in tandem with 4 4TB WD Red drives in some Raid config that I haven’t decided upon just yet.

The DL360 is verrrrrrrry heavy power draw compared to the rest of my stuff so utilizing it is a little finiky, not totally sure what to do it for just yet but considering setting up Active Directy on that to learn that system. It DOES have 48gigs of ECC DDR3 so definetly worth doing something with it or recycling this hardware into a more modern investment.

I’m still on the fence about building a PFSense box as trying to set up an entire router and not using Google Wifi is a pain to learn and the systems don’t play well together.

One major issue with my lab at the moment actually is the Google Wifi hardware. A shockingly major limitation of the stuff is that I can only port forward things with a physical MAC Address, and the main instance where I needed this was port forwarding a Virtual IP for Kemp Loadbalancer and that DOES NOT WORK ON GOOGLE WIFI HARDWARE. -_____- bruh.

At the moment the lab is going through an overhaul as I figure out what I want to learn versus wasted my time on and need to refresh. Current WIP’s are figuring out VPN access over either Cloudflare Tunnles or potentially TailScale, having a heavy debate internally about how much I trust my own self-hosted services versus using something outsid of me that will just work.

Additionally I am building my own documentation “site” via Confluence as I have tons of experience browsing it at work. (Hilarious that I used it for a year before ever considering using it at home after a video from Christian Lempa hit my feed about it. Does lots of good tech content suggest checking into.) While using Lucidchart to figure out Network Diagrams and best practices for setting up my network vs higher level ones and how I can improve in the future as the needs flux.

This post will be re-done and updated as my lab changes.