Setting up a home lab is one of the best investments you can make for learning IT and cybersecurity hands-on. Here's how I built mine.
Hardware
I'm running a Dell OptiPlex Micro with a quad-core i5, 32 GB RAM, and a 1 TB NVMe drive. Small, quiet, and power-efficient — perfect for 24/7 operation.
Proxmox Setup
After flashing the Proxmox ISO to a USB drive, installation takes about 10 minutes. The web UI is immediately available at https://<ip>:8006.
# Post-install: remove the enterprise repo nag
sed -i 's/^deb/#deb/' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list
# Add the no-subscription repo
echo "deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bookworm pve-no-subscription" \
> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-no-sub.list
apt update && apt full-upgrade -y
First VMs
I started with three VMs:
- pfSense — firewall and router for VLAN segmentation
- Debian — general-purpose server for Docker containers
- Kali Linux — dedicated penetration testing environment
Network Segmentation
Using VLANs keeps lab traffic isolated from the home network:
| VLAN | Purpose | Subnet | |------|-----------------|-----------------| | 10 | Management | 10.0.10.0/24 | | 20 | Servers | 10.0.20.0/24 | | 30 | Lab / Pentest | 10.0.30.0/24 |
What's Next
In upcoming posts I'll cover setting up WireGuard for remote access, deploying a SIEM with Wazuh, and automating VM provisioning with Terraform.