This is my 2026 overview of my homelab. Here I go over everything I use almost on a daily basis. Feel free to surf around.

Network#

The heart of my network is my Mikrotik hEX router. It has multiple VLANs, doing DNS forwarding and distributing IP addresses over DHCP.

Additionally it has some Wireguard tunnels towards my Hetzner Cloud servers that I don’t have to expose the management access towards the wild wild internet. Overall I have three different VLAN segments terminating on the router:

  • Client
  • Server
  • Tailscale

The client networks contains, all my laptops, iPad, iPhone and gaming PC. Basically all my known trusted devices. The server network contains all my (virtual) servers - what a surprise I know. But it also includes my backup server. The tailscale network contains only my tailscale subnet router. With the extra subnet I have more control over the access from the VPN client when its routed over the firewall.

In order to connect my devices I have two switches. One TP-Link SG2016P and one Mikrotik CRS309-1G-8S+IN. The following image shows the general connection of my clients and my servers.

Storage#

The two times 2TB SSDs onside the PVE nodes stores the base OS and smaller virtual disks where the speed is needed or an advantage like caching or databases. This storage is not redundant but the data which is stored on the SSD can easily be restored or is not worth the extra redundancy.

Now it gets complicated. Since the PBS server is a normal Debian server under the hood, we can make use of it to also provide NFS shared besides my normal backup procedure. When I need to store larger files or important files, the virtual hard disk will get stored on a separate ZFS pool on the PBS which is shared over NFS. Both the PBS and PVE are connected to the CRS309 so we have a direct 10Gbit/s connection at Layer 2.

The only reason on why I do this, is that I have currently no other way to connect these 3.5“ hard drives to the MS-01. I don’t want an extra device only for the NFS share, so this is currently my best option to use my current backup hardware.

The backups are processed normally by PBS but on a different ZFS pool so at least this is separated.

On the NFS pool I also use sanoid to make hourly, daily, monthly and yearly snapshots of the virtual disks.

root@pbs:/etc/sanoid# cat sanoid.conf 
[zpool/nfs]
        use_template = production
        recursive = yes

#############################
# templates below this line #
#############################

[template_production]
        frequently = 0
        hourly = 36
        daily = 30
        weekly = 4
        monthly = 12
        yearly = 3
        autosnap = yes
        autoprune = yes

Backup#

Backups will be stored on the onsite PBS server. A second onsite PBS server will be turned on every month and will be synced manually for more or less disaster recovery when the first onsite PBS fails.

As an offsite solution I use remote-backups.com - a cloud PBS solution hosted in different locations in Germany. Since I have limited space on the offsite dataset I only sync important data (VM disks) to the cloud provider. The data is already encrypted on my onsite server, which means it will also be send and stored encrypted without any knowledge about the data.

Services#

  • Immich (Photo Backup)
  • Nextcloud (File Sync)
  • Baikal (CalDAV/CardDAV)
  • File Server (SMB/SFTP)
  • Paperless (DMS)
  • Vaultwarden (Passwords)
  • Homebox (Inventory of my homelab)
  • Forgejo (Git)
  • Linkwarden (Storing and preserving websites and links)
  • Technitium DNS (Internal DNS resolver; DNS blocking)
  • NGINX (Reverse Proxy)

Hardware#

Overview#

Server#

  1. PVE01: Minisforum MS-01 - i9-13900H; 98GB (2x48GB) RAM; 2x Samsung SSD 990 Pro 2TB
  2. PVE02: Minisforum MS-01 - i9-13900H; 98GB (2x48GB) RAM; 2x Samsung SSD 990 Pro 2TB
  3. PBS01:
    • 2U Case: Inter-Tech 2U-2404L SATA
    • CPU: Ryzen 7 5700G (Stock Cooler)
    • Mainboard: ASRock B550M Pro4
    • RAM: Kingston Fury DDR4 3600 64GB Kit (2x32GB)
    • SSD: Intel SSDPEKNW512G8
    • PSU: Fractal Design ION+ 2 Platinum 660W
    • Fans: Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM
    • 2x Seagate Ironwolf 4TB (ZFS Mirror for PBS Datastore)
    • 1x Seagate Ironwolf 12TB / 1x Toshiba N300 12TB (ZFS Mirror for NFS share)
  4. PBS02:
    • i3-4130T CPU
    • Asus P9D-I Motherboard
    • 16GB (2x8GB) ECC RAM
    • 6x 1TB WD Blue hard drive (left over drives)

Network#

  1. Mikrotik hEX RB750Gr3
  2. Mikrotik CRS309-1G-8S+IN
  3. TP-Link SG2016P
  4. TP-Link EAP245 v3

Proxmox Virtual Environment#

This year I got two new Minisforum MS-01 with an i9-13900H and 98GB (2x48GB) of RAM. Yes I know.. call me lucky because I didn’t actually paid for the hardware - somebody else did. ^^ The fans from the MS-01 actually are pretty noisy even when I replaced the thermal paste. According to the internet and other forums the i7 is a bit better on that but still also noisy. I am still looking for a good mod to reduce the noise but until now I have to live with this. These two act as my virtualization layer, but for now only one is running 24/7 and the other will be turned on if I need additional compute or want to try something completely different.

Proxmox Backup Server#

The Proxmox Backup Server is now my old PVE host described here. Since then the only thing I added was a 10Gbit/s networking card otherwise it stayed the same. Besides hardware, the only thing I changed configuration wise is the storage layout and configuration described further down.

My plans for the future#

First and foremost I am waiting for the hEX Pro to be released so I can also internally route on Layer 3 between my networks with 10Gbit/s.

Secondly I want to separate my backup to a own subnet and VLAN. But since it includes also my NFS share and you normally should not route your storage I don’t know if this is feasible unless I find a better way to connect the hard drives to the MS-01. So in general a bit of a rework of the network design. It is also not a really good idea to put you normal data besides your backup on the same hardware, since one bad power supply can fry all hard drives. I also have a second backup onside but planning for the worst is better than prayers.

Another topic I want to try, is to host my blog inside my homelab but exposed over a VPS with MikroTik CHR installed and a dedicated designed DMZ for this. But I am currently not sure if the DSL internet connection at my home is suitable enough for that.

The backups are currently pushed towards the offsite location and pruning is also trigged from the onsite server. For better security a pull with remote pruning options would be better.