Architecture

Now that I had an ESXi up and running successfully, it was time to decide on the VMs that will run. The clear-cut choices were one Ubuntu server and one Windows server. The former would be running docker and all the containers, whereas the latter would provide LDAP (with Active Directory) and DNS services. Pretty good with those two, I started looking for something that can serve as a NAS....

My journey into building a home lab started with a simple raspberry pi running a couple of services like pi-hole and samba. The next jump came when I build myself a “gaming” PC with enough horses to pull a dozen docker containers without affecting the overall system in any way. It was overkill, of course, with a six-core twelve-thread beast of a processor, 32 GB RAM, and an RTX 3060Ti running full time only to serve my nextcloud and jellyfin applications....