What I Run in My Homelab (and Why It Makes Me Better at Work)

Every consultant I respect has a lab. Not because the certifications demand it, but because there’s a kind of understanding you only get from running something yourself, breaking it, and having nobody to escalate to but yourself.

The current setup

Nothing exotic — the point is that it’s mine:

• A small cluster I can rebuild from scratch without anyone noticing.
• vSphere, because muscle memory matters and I never want it to go rusty.
• Segmented VLANs and a firewall, so I can practise the network designs I ship for real.
• Whatever I’m currently trying to understand, deployed deliberately badly first.

Why it pays off at work

A lab is where I’m allowed to be wrong cheaply. That’s the entire value.

When a client asks “what happens if this fails?”, I’ve usually already pulled the plug on the same thing at home and watched it fall over. Lately the lab’s been where I poke at AI tooling and automation — low stakes, high learning. The day job rewards the curiosity, but the lab is where it actually lives.