How to set up a micro lab: four principles for a reliable homelab

After over a decade of running a homelab, I have learned a few difficult lessons. Although it begins as a “lab,” you inevitably end up with something you want to keep. If a service goes down for an extended period of time or you lose data, it can feel catastrophic. The anxiety of missed emails when my postfix server goes down has kept me up for many a long night. Through trial and error, I was able to minimize the frequency of disasters and recover more quickly from them. I now wish to pass these lessons down to new homelab enthusiasts in the form of four principles.

These four key principles have helped me maintain a reliable homelab that my family, friends, and I could rely on, while also giving me the latitude to enjoy experimenting.

1. Plan for more

Simple, made-to-purpose machines can make for a quick start, but may hinder you in the future – so it helps to plan for more capacity than what you need right now. 

Small form factor (SSF) computers make great little servers for a homelab. They are quiet, power efficient, and many models come with sufficient specs to use them as virtualization hypervisors. These machines are also ubiquitous and you can frequently find them being resold in large volumes. If SSF devices are hard to find in your area, some folks may opt for single-board computers, like a Raspberry Pi, to accomplish a similar setup.

The limitation of these machines is that they often don’t allow you to expand. There is usually only room for one internal hard drive, the CPU may be soldered in, and don’t even think about fitting a GPU or upgraded network card in there! You might not think you need the increased compute or faster transfer speeds now – but as you continue using your homelab, you’ll certainly want them in the future.

A safer bet is to build your homelab computer from scratch. If you don’t have experience with custom rigs, websites like PCPartPicker make it easy with part compatibility checks, price comparison, and curated builds. A micro-ATX motherboard can often support an NVME disk, 4-6 SATA hard drives, and multiple PCIe devices, not to mention the possibility of upgrading memory and the CPU. Some cases even come with hot swap drive bays ready to use. Just be careful to closely check that the board will support as many devices as you need: just because it has two m.2 slots and 3 PCIe lanes doesn’t mean you can fill them all. These slots will sometimes share bandwidth and only allow a certain number of devices at a time. 

2. Simplify the boring stuff

Infrastructure management and virtualization is a breeze with snaps. Unless you are a cloud engineer, you don’t want to slug through kubernetes the hard way or worry about storage array tuning. Even if you are a cloud engineer, do you really want to do this stuff in your free time? 

Enter what I call a micro lab. The power of virtual machines (VMs), container orchestration, and distributed storage can all be unleashed with a simple snap install. Setting up your own cloud would normally take days, but now can be spun up in 5 minutes in most cases.

Want to run containers? There’s MicroK8s. Want to run VMs in a public cloud type of environment? There’s Canonical OpenStack. Want both? There’s MicroCloud. All of these are backed by MicroCeph, a distributed storage solution packaged as a single snap.

Once you have one of these installed, you can focus on the things you really want to do with your homelab, like running Nextcloud for cloud storage and shared calendars or training your next LLM. My own micro lab uses MicroK8s and MicroCeph, which are wildly simple to integrate. Although the setup feels like cheating because it is so easy, the snaps don’t hinder the software at all. I’m still able to do advanced tuning and use all the features of the underlying infrastructure when I want to.

3. Declare your valuables

Defining your core infrastructure and applications in a declarative way simplifies deployment and protects you from disaster. However, you don’t need a complex CI/CD pipeline and GitOps workflow to build a resilient micro lab. 

With MicroCloud, all of your virtual instances, networks, and storage can be defined with a YAML text file. You can further automate the setup and configuration of instances with cloud-init, which can be shared across multiple instances with profiles. This declarative method can also be used with MicroK8s. Sunbeam extends this method even further by adding Terraform to the mix.

4. Back that thing up

If any data is not backed up, you should be okay with losing it. 

The first thing I do after deploying a new application is create a regularly occurring backup job for any relevant configuration or data. If I decide I don’t want to run it anymore in a week, I can delete the application and all the backups. If I end up using it long term, then I won’t have to try and remember to backup the data when it becomes too valuable to lose.

MicroCeph makes backups easy because it has built-in support for mirroring snapshots of block volumes and file systems to a secondary cluster or offsite instance. It also supports replicating S3 objects to a remote site. Although I have 3 physical nodes at home, even a single node offsite (in the cloud or running at a friend’s house) is enough to protect all of my data in any format. Exporting volumes or files is also straightforward and allows for offline backups or migrating data to other platforms.

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My homelab has grown organically and changed a lot over the past decade. I wish someone had shared this advice with me before I started so I could’ve saved myself a few bucks and a lot of headaches. Keep these principles in mind when you (re)build your homelab. I promise they will make your life easier and set you up for long-term success.