Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers

After years of self-hosting on a VPS in a datacenter, I’ve decided to move my services at home. But instead of just porting services, I’m using this as an opportunity to migrate to a more flexible and robust set up.

I will deploy services on a single mini pc. Since I need to be able to experiment and learn without disrupting my services, I will need to be able to spin up Virtual Machines (VMs). Let’s explore how I deployed Proxmox Virtual Environment on a safe host for my specific needs as a homelabber, and how I automated as much of it as possible. In a follow-up post we will explore how to spin-up and configure VMs in a reproducible way on that setup.

After realizing that my good old Raspberry Pi 4 was too slow to let me backup or restore on an encrypted disk, I bought a Minisforum UM880 Plus. At €600 it was not extremely expensive, but I don’t intend to spend more on hardware in the foreseeable future and I want to make the most of what I have right now.

I love to experiment and would like to do it safely without putting my production set-up at risk. Those are self-hosted services mostly for my personal usage, so I can afford occasional downtime, but I don’t want to have to rebuild everything if my experiments go wrong. I also don’t want to experiment by spinning up VMs at a cloud provider, because I will not know what I’m doing while learning, and cloud providers can get expensive very quickly.

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