Hi! This is probably my first post in homelab. Everything you see in the picture is mine except for the Dell servers and the Mikrotik router.
- 6x HP DL380 G9 (one isn’t visible in the photo)
- 1x Checkpoint 5800
- 1x Juniper 3300 EX
- 1x Juniper QFX5100 QSFP+ 40Gbit
Two years ago, I was working in a service desk role. I then transitioned to a SOC position, and later I joined the network team, but my role was specifically dedicated to firewalls and security products. When I took on this role, I felt the need to deepen my understanding, so I set up a home lab. It quickly became too warm at home, so I found a datacenter I liked.
These past two years have been a great learning experience. Five of the DL380s are in a VMware cluster with around 600TB DAS storage spread across all the ESXi hosts. Another HP is a TrueNAS SSD-SAN with 256GB RAM. I’ve got 3 VDEVs mirrored with Kingston DC500m 3.84TB, totaling six disks in the TrueNAS.
Among the services I run are a Kubernetes cluster, GitLab repo CI/CD, Portainer, Checkpoint management, PKI solution, Radius, Home Assistant for my house, Grafana, Prometheus, a full AD infrastructure, Pi-hole, Storj nodes (hence the substantial storage), GNS3 server, backup solutions, Emby for family and friends with GPU, SQL hosting, Ansible, Terraform, iTop ticketing system (just starting), Nginx, and F5 load balancers. This is just a glimpse, as I have over 150 VMs and likely around 100 microservices running.
Right now, I’m focusing on infrastructure as code and home automation. Setting up this home lab has been a rewarding personal journey for me.
All management is isolated via the management switch (EX3300), and the core network is on 40Gbit. While most of my switches primarily handle L2, I do run some L3 tests on them. However, the Checkpoint manages all networks, and I have around 50 VLANs.
At home, I have a smaller Checkpoint firewall that connects via S2S VPN to the data center and some offsite backup at home in Synology.
Thanks to this forum, it’s genuinely inspiring to see everyone’s setups. 
**EDIT**
I’d like to add to anyone thinking about getting a homelab, go for it. I am in no means an expert in any field yet, but too understand the whole infrastructure of a standard company do give you an advantage. Even though i work with network, understanding kubernetes/docker, linux, AD, loadbalancers, firewalls, it security, automation and git pipelines. Gives you a solid understanding how everything works together. Which is awesome because you can talk with everyone in the IT department and understand eachothers needs. Also in troubleshooting perspective. And ever since chatgpt came out it has been my co-teacher, whenever i feel lost in something i just ask chat gpt to explain topic for me and if that is not enough answer you should atleast been guided in the right direction where you can google it/ or the otherway around.
