Tearing Down My Homelab and Starting Over

Recently, I decided to tear down my existing homelab and start from scratch. Until now, it was just an old desktop running Debian — a simple setup that had served its purpose. But earlier this year, I began thinking more seriously about expanding my self-hosted infrastructure. Inspired by the many people running their own media servers, home assistants, network storage, and even personal AI agents, I felt like I had to do something too.

There’s a certain satisfaction in configuring and troubleshooting everything myself. By knowing every piece of my system and tailoring, it is what motivates me.

This article is the start of many, which as part 1 covers the design, software stack, and hardware selection. In the future parts, they will be explaining how I configure them, and maybe some fun stories.

Things want to host

Media server
Smart home automation
Self-study materials, specifically for DevOps
Backups
AI agents

And more to decide…

Hardware

Servers, HP EliteDesk 800 G6 Mini, or Dell OptiPlex 7080 Micro, or maybe Intel NUC
Synology DS925+ (I know the HDD restriction sucks…)
Home Assistant SkyConnect USB
HomePod Mini

And more to come for smart home devices and future AI workloads.

Software stack

Proxmox VE for server OS
K3s cluster with Promox VMs nodes for app hosting
GitLab EE with GitLab Runners for VCS and CI
ArgoCD for GitOps
Tailscale for VPN
Cloudflared for tunneling
Grafana, Prometheus, Alert Manager, and Loki for monitoring
Jellyfin + Sonarr/Radarr for media server
Home Assistant for core smart home controller
Synology software for backups

Diagram

                 ┌────────────────────────────────────────┐
                 │              Home Network              │
                 │          (Connected via Ethernet)      │
                 └────────────────────────────────────────┘
                               │
        ┌──────────────────────┼────────────────────────┐
        │                      │                        │
┌────────────────┐   ┌────────────────┐        ┌────────────────┐
│ Proxmox Node 1 │   │ Proxmox Node 2 │        │      NAS       │
│                │   │                │        │ (NFS + Backups)│
└────────────────┘   └────────────────┘        └────────────────┘
        │                      │
        │     Proxmox Cluster  │
        └───────────┬──────────┘
                    │
         ┌──────────┴────────────┐
         │    K3s Cluster (VMs)  │
         └───────────────────────┘
         ┌────────┬─────────────┬─────────┐
         │        │             │         │
      [master]   [worker]   [worker]     ...
         │        │             │
         └────────┴─────────────┘
            Uses NFS Storage via NAS

Wrap up

As I mentioned above, this article mainly covers my planning so far, acting as a kickstart for my homelab redesign project. I cannot guarantee the frequency of publishing the next articles, but the next one is probably setting up the new DS925+ NAS.

Many of the software programs in my list are chosen because of my skill set. They may not be the best choice in their use cases, so please let me know if there are better options!

So stay tuned!