HomeLab: The Self Hosted Path To Leveling Up

I’m sharing this video for those of you who couldn’t make it to my talk at MSPGeekCon 2025—or for anyone who did attend and wants to revisit the session. This presentation, “HomeLab: The Self-Hosted Path to Leveling Up,” covers how to build a powerful and affordable private cloud using mostly free and open source tools. Whether you’re looking to sharpen your skills, test new solutions, or just tinker in your off hours, this should give you a solid starting point. Video referenced in the talk Take Control of Your Security: Free, Self-Hosted SIEM & Logs with Graylog, Wazuh, & Security Onion https://youtu.be/GZZZvLRSUvc?si=VHeKqOWFMujj4pSS XCP-ng playlist https://lawrence.video/xcp-ng UniFi Playlist https://lawrence.video/unifi TrueNAS Playlist https://lawrence.video/truenas Getting Up and Running with Ollama https://youtu.be/y2RewtPQIbk?si=rL-fTln-jBqnkNvS Netbird VPN https://youtu.be/Kwrff6h0rEw?si=Rxt7pcTtQxWK43_y Connect With Us --------------------------------------------------- + Hire Us for a project: https://lawrencesystems.com/hire-us/ + Toms' Twitter 🐦 https://twitter.com/TomLawrenceTech + Our Website https://www.lawrencesystems.com/ + Our Forums https://forums.lawrencesystems.com/ + Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lawrencesystems/ + Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Lawrencesystems/ + GitHub https://github.com/lawrencesystems/ + Discord https://discord.gg/ZwTz3Mh Lawrence Systems Shirts and Swag --------------------------------------------------- ►👕 https://lawrence.video/swag/ AFFILIATES & REFERRAL LINKS --------------------------------------------------- Amazon Affiliate Store 🛒 https://www.amazon.com/shop/lawrencesystemspcpickup UniFi Affiliate Link 🛒 https://lawrence.video/unifi-affiliate All Of Our Affiliates help us out and can get you discounts! 🛒 https://lawrencesystems.com/partners-we-love/ Gear we use on Kit 🛒 https://kit.co/lawrencesystems Use OfferCode LTSERVICES to get 10% off your order at 🛒 https://www.techsupplydirect.com?aff=2 Digital Ocean Offer Code 🛒 https://m.do.co/c/85de8d181725 HostiFi UniFi Cloud Hosting Service 🛒 https://hostifi.net/?via=lawrencesystems Protect your privacy with a VPN from Private Internet Access 🛒 https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/buy-vpn/LRNSYS Patreon 💰 https://www.patreon.com/lawrencesystems Chapters 00:00 MSPGeek 2025 Homelab Talk 00:30 HomeLab: The Self Hosted Path To Leveling Up 02:28 Why Build a Homelab? 04:32 Homelab Project Ideas 05:09 Home Assistant 08:32 Media Servers 09:55 Network Security Tools 11:18 Self Hosted LLM Ollama 12:28 Open Source Automation 13:53 Self Hosted VPN Netbird 14:47 Containers 17:57 Virtualization XCP-ng and Proxmox 19:45 TrueNAS Storage 21:17 Synology Strorage 22:28 Firewalls pfsense, OPNSense and UnIFi 24:55 Network Switching and WIFi 27:29 Homelab Server Choices 31:47 Some Final Thoughts on Homelabs