RizoHomeLabPERSONAL ENGINEERING LAB
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01 / Infrastructure

A rack with a purpose.
Several, actually.

Enterprise hardware, self-hosted services and enough moving parts to keep the engineering interesting.

Rizo Rack servers and storage, with identifying labels removed

Separate the jobs.
Understand the dependencies.

The lab spans a six-node Proxmox cluster. Four Dell PowerEdge systems form the rack's main compute, application, storage and web-hosting platform.

Virtualisation makes workloads portable. It does not make their storage, network or power dependencies disappear.

Inventory review / 2026-10-18
Hardware snapshot

The PowerEdge fleet.

PowerEdge R740

Compute & GPU workloads

2 × Xeon Gold 6230128 GB installed

PowerEdge R640

Applications & infrastructure

Xeon Gold 6230192 GB installed

PowerEdge R640

Storage & backup roles

Xeon Gold 623096 GB installed

PowerEdge R440

Web & supporting services

Xeon Silver 411432 GB installed

Inventory assessed on 18 October 2026; specifications are a dated snapshot. Installed RAM is distinct from guest allocations.

Architecture, without the operational map.

Different jobs. Deliberate boundaries.
  1. COMPUTEProxmox → application guests
  2. STORAGETrueNAS → datasets & media
  3. RECOVERYPBS → separate backup roles
  4. WEBStatic releases → Caddy

Conceptual architecture. Operational addresses and configuration deliberately omitted.

Compute

Proxmox hosts application guests, local AI, media and supporting infrastructure. Selected GPUs are assigned to individual guests rather than treated as one shared pool.

Storage

TrueNAS provides ZFS-backed storage with dedicated storage hardware passed through to its guest. Mirrors and RAIDZ layouts serve different purposes.

Recovery

Two Proxmox Backup Server instances provide separate backup roles. A second server is useful only when its storage and failure dependencies are understood.

Under the lid

The hardware is only half the story.

Reusable enterprise machines bring remote management, expansion and serviceability. They also bring power use, noise and a healthy respect for cooling.

Read the rack case study ↗
Close-up of server heatsinks and memory slots
SERVER INTERNALS / IDENTIFYING LABELS REMOVED

Connected across sites.

A MikroTik network provides a 10 GbE core and segmented service roles. A separate PowerBeam point-to-point wireless link connects the sites. Its capacity is a different constraint from the local wired core.

Two sites, one useful connection.
  1. HOME LABSegmented local services
  2. WIRELESS LINKPoint-to-point bridge
  3. REMOTE SITESelected infrastructure services

Conceptual architecture. Operational addresses and configuration deliberately omitted.

Wireless rate estimates are not measured application throughput. Operational addressing, radio locations and firewall details stay private.