~10 years ago, I had a completely full 42U cabinet in my house, along with another 8U or so of gear and several devices that aren't measured in RU's (access points, Cable and DSL modems, VoIP phones, etc.).
Most of the gear was used for lab scenarios and such for various (Cisco, Juniper, et al) networking certs and was (mostly, but not completely) isolated from my "real" network. IIRC, I had ~35 VLANs at one point.
My extremely over-engineered home lab certainly served its purpose but I think I spent as much time maintaining it as I did actually using it, although it really came in handy for building out PoCs for projects I was handling at $work (my test/lab network at $work wasn't nearly as well-equipped as my home lab was!).
For the last several years, though, I've managed to get by with a single subnet that is shared by everything -- a few laptops, a couple desktops, a server hosting the handful of obligatory VMs, and, of course, the various phones, tablets, and streaming devices that are ubiquitous in all of our homes nowadays.
Just within the last few weeks, however, I've acquired a new server (2 x 10-core Xeons, 256 GB RAM, 4 "Enterprise" SSDs and 12 "Enterprise" HDDs (600 GB 15k SAS)), dug a couple switches out of storage in the garage, replaced my Internet router with a small industrial box running OpenBSD, and started building out a few more subnets for proper separation of various devices (I've twice been offered a 42U cabinet recently but, thus far, managed to say no!). Like probably most HN'ers, I've got a few VPSes spread out here and there as well. Finally, I've got a decent (but was over-built) 2U box in a rack at $work ($work == ISP) that I am planning to use to tie all of this together (using Wireguard, of course).
Yes, I'm fully aware that I'm in the beginning stages of a relapse. After these upcoming changes, however, I don't intend to "grow" this lab much larger (although this kinda stuff does just creep up on you sometimes).
I used to also have a 42U cabinet in my garage for several years. It housed a bunch of servers, mostly Dell poweredge but also some no-name boxes, plus some switches and other miscellaneous gear.
The power draw was too strong for my poorly garage circuit and after any power outage I had to power up the rack one device at a time - it was a massive pain. I also spent WAY too much time tinkering with it all, instead of actually using it in anger. Sure, it help me immensely doing PoCs for work or for my own learning, but it was always overkill. Funnily enough though, every other tech-head that saw it was envious, until I started detailing the horror stories of keeping it all running.
Thankfully Virtualisation became a usable and affordable platform for tinkerers, and I migrated everything (via a streamlined custom P2V process) to ESX, then later on migrated/rebuilt the VMs over to Hyper-V.
I now just run 2x Tower servers (HP 8xxx series workstations - dual Xeon based) and run 20+ VMs on each. Plus a single NAS for file storage. Life is so much easier... and the Garage is so much quieter.
Most of the gear was used for lab scenarios and such for various (Cisco, Juniper, et al) networking certs and was (mostly, but not completely) isolated from my "real" network. IIRC, I had ~35 VLANs at one point.
My extremely over-engineered home lab certainly served its purpose but I think I spent as much time maintaining it as I did actually using it, although it really came in handy for building out PoCs for projects I was handling at $work (my test/lab network at $work wasn't nearly as well-equipped as my home lab was!).
For the last several years, though, I've managed to get by with a single subnet that is shared by everything -- a few laptops, a couple desktops, a server hosting the handful of obligatory VMs, and, of course, the various phones, tablets, and streaming devices that are ubiquitous in all of our homes nowadays.
Just within the last few weeks, however, I've acquired a new server (2 x 10-core Xeons, 256 GB RAM, 4 "Enterprise" SSDs and 12 "Enterprise" HDDs (600 GB 15k SAS)), dug a couple switches out of storage in the garage, replaced my Internet router with a small industrial box running OpenBSD, and started building out a few more subnets for proper separation of various devices (I've twice been offered a 42U cabinet recently but, thus far, managed to say no!). Like probably most HN'ers, I've got a few VPSes spread out here and there as well. Finally, I've got a decent (but was over-built) 2U box in a rack at $work ($work == ISP) that I am planning to use to tie all of this together (using Wireguard, of course).
Yes, I'm fully aware that I'm in the beginning stages of a relapse. After these upcoming changes, however, I don't intend to "grow" this lab much larger (although this kinda stuff does just creep up on you sometimes).