What home lab or home server 2024 projects are you working on?

Are any of you guys planning on pivoting away from VMware in 2024? Wondering what everyone is thinking at this point?

My primary goal for 2024 is to finish codifying my homelab configs. Too long have I been strapped for time, lazy about locking in some of the things I use and have started to rely on. 

We use VMWare at work and there is a whole discussion going on there about the future of that infrastructure but at home, I started with ProxMox, dabbled with XCP-NG and have mostly settled on ProxMox at this point for VMs and containers. This is largely because VMWare was not cost-effective for what started out as a fun tinkering set of projects.

Happy new year!

probably sticking with vmware (for the majority of things) as i, uh... "have" a license for it and it's what i'm most familiar with. i did recently set up a proxmox host. so far i've only created a Win10 "client" machine for easy access to a clean workstation if i want to do something not on my main PC.

i'll probably put some backup VMs for critical stuff (active directory, DNS, etc) in case i have a big problem on my other hosts. but now that i'm typing that out... my vmware hosts have my opnsense instances. so if those go down DNS and active directory aren't much use anyways... 😀

@t3hbeowulf Definitely like what you are doing in your lab. I am looking at trying to get everything that is critical in my lab codified as well and hosted in a Git repo. I am trying to think of ways to automate most things that are mundane or take crazy amounts of time to do manually. Keep us posted what the direction in your work environment with VMware. I am curious what 2024 holds for vSphere in the enterprise and what most organizations decide to do.

@malcolm-r Definitely cool to see you starting to dabble in Proxmox and get a host up and running. I have to admit, I didn't like it at first coming from a VMware background. But it has definitely grown on me and has been fun experimenting with cool things like Ceph lately. Thinking about spinning up a small physical Proxmox cluster this year and running Ceph for HCI to host a few things.

Hi,

I will begin Proxmox lab based on Minisforum UN1245.

Mix use between personal & pro needs, if the stuff work well I will surely extend with an additional unit to secure the things.

• Personal needs : PiHole, NextCloud
• Pro needs : Active Directory, Citrix DaaS (Windows & Linux), NetScaler ADC, PKI and ADFS

@darknight welcome to the forums! Sounds like a great blueprint you have on what you want to spin up. Keep us posted on your progress and any pics you would like to share. 👍

Thank you ! I will try to build that quickly and the objective is really using Minipc to avoid having a rack in my house (my wife was not a big fan of that 🤣 ). After, in that type of project we always begin smart to finish so so bigger than the initial plan 🙄 

@darknight so true! We all have to keep the Mrs happy So definitely a good thing to consider. Home labs generally always turn out bigger than expected 😆

Hello,

Quick news from the field (and during the few time I have to work on my lab 😋 )

I received the Minisforum UN1245, works well under Proxmox with the Hybrid Intel processor (I setup the Intel microcode for stability perspective).

As you can imagine, memory is the primary limit I reach. I have 32GB and for the moment that works well but I think reaching the limit soon.

Happy remote access via my Citrix DaaS subscription thought Windows 11 VDI I'm waiting for Ubuntu 24.04 support to test that)

And also begin to play with NetScaler instance as well, I hope have Fiber connectivity at home soon to explore more on that topics and almost security features 😀 

For personal use, AdGuard LX container (with Raspberry pi3 for redundancy) to clean all the family web surfing and I think OMV VM and NextCloud LX container for files services and sharing

Stay tuned 😏