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My Homelab on Proxmox: From One Raspberry Pi to a 20U Rack

· Jerwin Arnado

In August 2019 I wrote about the Raspberry Pi 4 and called it not a gadget, but a direction. I predicted it would end with “a shelf, a labeled power strip, and opinions about VLANs.”

I was wrong about the shelf. It’s a 20U floor rack.

The slope, fully slid

What lives in the rack today:

  • Proxmox as the hypervisor — the heart of the lab, running on a Dell OptiPlex 3070 mini PC. VMs and containers for whatever I’m experimenting with this month.
  • Docker on Linux for the self-hosted services — including the Omada Controller that manages the whole network stack.
  • A Synology DS1517+ — five bays of storage and backups, and home of the media library.
  • Jellyfin as the media server — and the reason Graveyard Analytics exists. The lab doesn’t just run tools; it generates them.

The network grew opinions

The 2019 me joked about VLANs. The 2026 me runs an Omada SDN setup:

  • TP-Link ER605 router with dual-WAN failover — 1Gbps fiber as the primary, Starlink as automatic backup. When the fiber goes down (and in the Philippines, it does), the lab doesn’t notice.
  • TP-Link SG3428X — 24-port managed switch with 10G SFP+ uplinks.
  • TP-Link TL-SG1218MP — PoE+ switch powering the access points.
  • EAP610-Outdoor and EAP650-Wall access points covering the house inside and out.
  • An AMPCOM 2.5GbE switch as the multi-gig fast lane between the machines that deserve it.

And because brownouts are a fact of life here: three CyberPower UPS units keeping the whole stack up when the grid blinks.

Was the “systems education” argument right?

The original justification for the Pi was that running your own infrastructure is the cheapest systems education available. Seven years in, I’ll stand by it harder than ever.

My day job is Laravel, Drupal, and Vue — work that lives behind layers of managed hosting and CI/CD. The homelab is where the abstractions come off. DNS, VLANs, storage, backups, failover, certificates, reverse proxies: every one of them has broken on me at home first, which means very few of them have surprised me at work.

There’s also a quieter benefit I didn’t predict in 2019: the lab became a product lab. Jellyfin running on my own hardware is why Graveyard Analytics exists. The itch you can only get from operating your own services is where my open-source work comes from.

Filed follow-up

So, closing the loop on a seven-year-old post: the Pi was indeed a direction. It pointed at a rack.

The current gear list lives on my /uses page, which I keep updated as the lab evolves. And if a future post opens with “so I bought a second rack” — you were warned here first.