Home Lab: Self-Hosted Image Management
A personal home-lab project for learning virtualization, containerization, and self-hosted image management.
Goals for the project:
- Gain hands-on experience with virtualization and containerization
- Learn self-hosting for image storage and management
- Improve networking skills (DNS, gateways, routing)
- Experiment with home-lab setups safely
This project was intended to create a controlled environment where I could experiment with multiple technologies, understand how they interact, and gain real-world experience in system administration without relying on cloud providers.
What is Proxmox?
Proxmox is an open-source virtualization platform that allows you to run multiple virtual machines and containers on a single host. I used Proxmox as the backbone of my home-lab to deploy virtual environments safely and efficiently.
What is Immich?
Immich is a self-hosted image management and backup system. I deployed it via Docker containers in my home-lab to manage and store images privately without relying on third-party services. It helped me understand storage management, backups, and container orchestration in practice.
Features of my home-lab:
Virtualization
- Running multiple VMs on Proxmox for testing and service isolation.
- Learning resource allocation, snapshots, and VM management.
Containerization
- Deploying Docker containers for Immich and other services.
- Understanding container networking and orchestration.
Networking
- Configured internal DNS and gateways.
- Managed routing between virtual networks to simulate real-world environments.
Self-Hosted Image Management
- Full control over image storage and retrieval.
- Private, secure, and centralized system for personal media.
Key Learnings
- Practical knowledge of virtualization and containerization
- Hands-on experience with Docker deployments
- Networking fundamentals applied in a home-lab environment
- Self-hosted application management and storage solutions
This home-lab has been a playground to experiment, fail, learn, and grow my skills in system administration, DevOps practices, and self-hosting. It’s also a step toward building more advanced personal infrastructure in the future.