Real-world homelab projects covering infrastructure, virtualisation, networking, storage, monitoring and self-hosted services built and tested inside Realm Labs.
Every growing homelab reaches a point where remembering IP addresses, port numbers, and service URLs becomes a chore. If you are new to container management, my Docker and Portainer homelab guide provides the foundation for this setup. While browser bookmarks…
Proxmox VE gives a home lab two useful ways to run workloads: full virtual machines with their own kernels, and lightweight Linux Containers that share the Proxmox host kernel. Choosing the right one—and configuring storage, networking and drivers correctly—matters more…
Proxmox VE is the platform that turned a repurposed compact PC into the main virtualisation host for Realm Labs. The host is a Shuttle DS81 named QuanChi. It is not enterprise server hardware and it was never intended to be.…
One of the main goals behind Realm Labs is to run as much as possible on infrastructure I control. That naturally led to an interesting question: Could I host the Realm Labs website from my own homelab without exposing the…
Monitoring started out fairly simply in Realm Labs. At first, checking system health meant opening the individual management interface for whatever device I wanted to inspect. Proxmox had one dashboard. Synology had another. Windows had Task Manager. Home Assistant had…
Proxmox VE is the compute foundation behind Realm Labs. It runs on a repurposed Shuttle DS81 named QuanChi and provides the virtualisation layer for Linux containers, Windows virtual machines, monitoring services and internal tools. What began as a convenient test…
Storage is one of those parts of a homelab that can quietly become critical without you really noticing it happening. At first, a NAS is somewhere to put files. Then a Raspberry Pi starts using it for backups. Docker applications…
See how Realm Labs uses Docker and Portainer for self hosting, with repeatable Compose stacks, persistent storage, secure networking, updates and tested backups.