Reducing compute capacity and retiring unnecessary workloads in a home-lab to optimize power consumption and improve overall efficiency.

Home-labing is a hobby that can expand far beyond its original scope without you even noticing. Once you have a rack, the instinct to fill it is almost automatic. In my case, I ended up with two smaller racks, and that was all the encouragement I needed.

Coming from a background where I worked heavily with VMware, I was determined to build my own vSAN and converged compute environment. Before long, I had three hefty 4U servers, each loaded with generous amounts of RAM and powered by 24-core, energy-hungry processors. It was overkill in every sense, but at the time, it felt like the perfect home-lab dream.

The VMUG membership was the key enabler, costing roughly $200 annually providing VMware Advantage. This gave me access to a comprehensive suite of VMware licenses specifically intended for non-production environments.

Building and configuring the hardware was genuinely enjoyable. But when COVID arrived, our two-bedroom apartment didn’t exactly pair well with a full home-lab, and the living room effectively became a datacenter. After moving to a new house, I disassembled the cluster and never reassembled it. The fan noise, the SFP+ switch whine, the heat and power draw all made me hesitate to bring that entire setup back online.

Scope—something I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post—had slipped my mind over time. I had drifted away from the original goal and allowed the setup to grow far beyond what I actually needed. What I really wanted was a resilient storage platform for pictures and videos, nothing more. I didn’t need an entire cluster, and certainly not the full Gibson-sized infrastructure, to achieve that.

With that realization, the path forward is obvious: scale everything back. I’m consolidating the environment down to a single machine, something far simpler, quieter, and more energy-efficient. And honestly, one well-configured box is more than enough for the workload I have today.

I’ve also decided not to return to VMware. VMUG Advantage no longer aligns with my needs, so I’m shifting back to Proxmox and exploring what the platform can offer for a simplified, single node environment.