Homelab in a cabinet!

I got this sweet cabinet off the streets, one of my neighbors were giving it away and I saw the potential for a little homelab space.

The cabinet is divided into four tiers. The bottom tier(aka the floor), has my consoles, the second tier is a sliding shelf on rails(which is awesome), the thir tier has an old Bose cd switcher and my power strips behind it. Then the top tier holds my AVR and anything loose I have laying around.

My homelab itself sits on a sliding shelf, which is very very convenient for maintenance and upgrades. I don’t know the weight limit of the shelf, I guess I’ll find out eventually.

Just recently I replaced one of my Proxmox nodes and upgraded my networking setup. Before I was running an old Dell laptop with 4gb of ram that was useless for Proxmox, and a dual Apple airport setup that was less than ideal. The network dropped out constantly, and was unreliable.

Since then I’ve replaced the dell laptop with this new optiplex that I love. And replaced the airports with Eero Pro 2’s that are absolutely perfect.

The rails themselves don’t sit flush against the wall so I have a small switch tucked in the open area for now, although I plan to upgrade that switch soon. (Maybe I’ll get a rack switch and attach it to the roof of the inside of the cabinet or even the bottom of the sliding shelf…)

My lab has two Proxmox nodes,
The HP laptop is my old daily driver, 6th gen Core i8 with 8gb of ram, and a 500GB SDD.
The optiplex is a 6th gen Core i5 also with 8gb of ram(although I will be upgrading that soon), with a 128 M.2 boot drive(and lvm space), with a 1tb hard drive that was originally in the HP laptop.

The hardware upgrades also included a Proxmox upgrade to, the services my lab run have been down for days. But I’m getting them back up soon.

I have three vm’s, a Windows Server VM(with a version I won’t disclose lol), that handles DNS, IIS, Sharepoint, and whatever I’m experimenting with. A fedora server vm that hosts immich, planka, and safeline, and a Debian server that hosts Nextcloud, jellyfin, code-server, and anything else that sounds fun.

Overall I love my little homelab, and no it doesn’t overheat in the cabinet at all. I can’t wait for more upgrades, and to get my damn Nextcloud back online!