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”?
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Also a long time homelabber, with a lab that’s run on a tight budget. There’s no money for the latest and greatest, but today’s white hot tech quickly falls out of favour and sooner or later finds it’s way to the bargain basement. That’s where it’ll be.
It’s at this point I’ll be retiring older tech for newer old tech and so it goes on. Incremental upgrades, never finished.
On the whole, hardware wise, I’m very pleased with what I’ve got and don’t feel I’m missing out, but that won’t stop me looking for the next best thing my empty pockets can afford.
I am about 25 years into the journey of doing IT more than just using a computer as a computer.
Early memories are having the side of my PC case open with IDE hard drives sticking out the side so that I had more storage.
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.