I am an idiot. Don’t take what I say as gospel…
Sorry for the delay, I am not active on Forums.
I think it’s important to make a clear distinction of “Homelab” and “Homeprod”. There are services I use on a regular basis that I started off just testing and ended up liking. I kept them in the homelab but was using them and giving access to my wife, family, and friends. This is when it becomes “homeprod”. At this point you need to have a maintenance/downtime planning as people are now depending on/and expecting it. My homeprod runs on lower-power hardware and runs 99% of the time.
Proxmox, IMO, is a great choice. The Vates Stack (XCP-ng / Xen Orchestra) is another great option, though the community is much smaller and I believe the adoption rate in homelabs is much lower. I have a four node Proxmox Cluster setup with HA, but no Ceph. I have two 2U servers that I will be putting into an XCP-ng cluster as the Vates stack is much more forgiving towards an even amount of nodes.
With your hardware being a single Dell OptiPlex, I would personally install Proxmox. Their use of LXC’s will allow your hardware to stretch further than you may think it can go.
Potential Hardware Upgrades
This is absolutely not required, just a recommendation
I would consider getting a small NVME SSD and PCIE adapter that you can install the OS on so that you have dedicated storage on that 500GB SSD for VMs. Down the road when/if you have the funds, I would bump up the RAM so that old workstation can go even further. If you have some extra scratch, I would grab a SATA HDD and pass the entire drive into a Proxmox Backup Server VM so you can have separately stored backups just in case something happens and you want to restore VMs/CTs.
Services
CT Services
All of these can be installed on Debian CT’s in Proxmox
- pihole - Can act as your DNS and DHCP if you want. (This will quickly become “homeprod” so try to plan ahead. There are better options, but none that I have experience with)
- Reverse Proxy - I prefer to use Nginx, but that is all bias. It’s was I learned and used first. There are limitations. look at Apache, Caddy (homelab YouTuber’s love this one), or others. Don’t let me make your decisions for you.
- Netbox - Infrastructure tracking amoung other things including IPAM which will be very nice as your lab/prod environments grow.
- Firewall - You can do a lot with OPNsense/PFSense, they make it easy. You can do most of the same things with Debian and Iptables/NFtables, just takes a LOT more work, though you will come out on the other side much better.
- Automation Server - I like to keep my automation server controllers virtualized, and just ssh into them to manage files and run things, see Ansible and Terraform.
VM SERVICES
These services are much heavier, need to be installed on VMs.
- Cloud Hosting - Nextcloud/Owncloud - Host your own files/calendar/etc… (This will quickly become “homeprod” so be cautious and try to plan ahead)
- Cloud Photo Storage - Immich
Misc Notes
I would recommend watching Jay’s SSH series and setup keypairs for your lab/prod. You can use the same keys if you want. Not only will it make your life easier, but will be more secure as well.
Good luck and happy homelabbing!
