In 27yrs of homelab addiction, I have set i486 BBS servers, ran Slackware 4, bought a sun SPARCstation for next to lunch money, because didn’t run windows 98. And everything after… VMware GSX, ESX, ESXi, VSAN, hyperV, KVM, Xen, Citrix, Windows, Linux, networking: catalyst, procurve, powerconnect, force10, 3com, Mikrotik… I even had HP MSA1000, terramasters, qnap, freenas, truenas, Synology, xpenology… Storages.
Once had Citrix netscalers mpx7500 to play with, Kemp and even a very old F5 box.
Thinking about it… I have never had a “finished state” on any of my homelab iterations. Hence the title of the post…
Homelabs are as dynamic as the technology you are using it to learn… Never catching up.
I don’t think that a homelab is ever ready…
What do you guys think? Ever finished a homelab? How long it lasted on the “finished state”?
Initially it was about the journey, now I find myself needing to migrate about half of the software I run into a stable environment. Really didn’t expect self-hosted FOSS software to be so competitive with paid cloud solutions feature-wise, not going back to paying for subscriptions.