davebrownblog.com

Overview

One of my personal projects for 2026 is upgrading my home lab. A total redesign from the ground up. But if I’m being honest, this isn’t a major overhaul – maybe not an overhaul at all. Realistically, this will be more of a greenfield project for my home setup, as what I have right now is pretty much the bare-bones, out of the box configuration: A service provider router and AP. Yes, I am ashamed of myself – no need to browbeat me any further. Cyber ninjas, show me some mercy please! This has been another one of those “to do” items that I’m finally getting an around-to-it to deal with. The goal is to deliver a home lab that will support my modern and expanding engineering needs – i.e. automation testing, telemetry & monitoring, virtualization and network simulation, etc. This Lab Notebook entry documents, at a high-level, the overall plan and scope of this project and tracks its progress with new entries into the notebook.

Scope

My current home lab – as already confessed – is basic, not very secure, and under-powered for my growing needs. I’ve got my internet connection, a basic software firewall, wireless of course, and my primary daily driver laptop running my virtual environments for hosting Cisco CML-personal and WSL abstractions (and not simultaneously thanks to hardware and software limitations😡) etc.

There are some deficiencies, to say the least.

The scope is deliver a secure and segmented home lab environment that will serve my lab needs and my home’s IoT network needs. The initial list of required hardware that’ll be procuring over the next few weeks:

• 9U four post rack
• 8/12 Port Managed Network Switch
• Firewall
  • Physical or Virtual (TBD)
• Hypervisor core server
  • Proxmox or VMWare (TBD)
    • CML Personal
    • Linux Distro’s etc.
• Wireless AP
• UPS
• NAS

Design Notes

Landing Topology

• Network Segmentation
  • VLAN Breakdown
    • LAB
    • CML/Simulation
    • IoT
    • Guests
    • Management
• Virtualization Layer
  • Proxmox or VMWare running:
    • CML Personal
    • Linux VMs
    • Monitoring stack
    • Automation containers
    • NAS (either VM or passthrough storage, TBD)
• Telemetry & Monitory Layer
  • Still being fleshed out
• Automation Layer
  • Still being fleshed out
    • Python
    • Ansible & API-Driven Workflows
    • Agentic AI, etc…

Goal

Lab

Run The Lab