I’ve learned a ton from this community and figured it was time to contribute (and get some perspective).
tl;dr This homelab is objectively unnecessary for a 1,200 sq ft home with two people — but here we are. I’m sitting on ~150 GB of unused RAM and plenty of headroom. Looking for ideas on efficiency, consolidation, or genuinely useful ways to put the extra capacity to work. Also open to the brutal take: should I rip and sell while the market’s hot?
Core Use Cases Strong network segmentation (Trusted / Work / IoT / Cameras / Guests / Servers) Container-first Proxmox (LXCs for everything; VMs later if/when needed) Media, automation, monitoring, DNS, backups 10GbE everywhere it actually matters
Compute / Virtualization Proxmox VE 8.4.x (single node) CPU: AMD EPYC 9124 (Zen 4, 16C / 32T) Memory: 192 GB DDR5-4800 ECC RDIMM Motherboard: Supermicro H13SSL-N (IPMI/BMC)
Workloads ~22 LXC containers (20 typically online) No always-on VMs (LXCs where possible)
Storage QNAP NAS (10GbE) Spinning disks: 4 × 14 TB WD HDDs SSD cache: 2 × Corsair MP600 Core XT (2 TB each)
Networking (UniFi Stack)
Gateway / Routing UniFi UXG Pro ISP: Bell Fiber (10 GbE SFP+ / ~8 Gbps symmetric) Dual-WAN capable, currently single active WireGuard VPN hosted on gateway Raspberry Pi 5 (Pi-hole + Unbound)
Switching USW Aggregation (10 GbE) USW Pro Max 24 PoE (10 GbE uplink) USW Flex 2.5G (Living Room + Upstairs) USP PDU Pro UniFi Protect NVR (10 GbE) 5 cameras + doorbell
Wi-Fi U7 Pro XG (Wi-Fi 6E) — primary AP AC Pro — secondary 6 GHz enabled for trusted devices
VLANs / Subnets Management: 192.168.1.0/24 Servers & Containers: 192.168.20.0/24 Main (Trusted): 192.168.30.0/24 Work: 192.168.40.0/24 IoT: 192.168.50.0/24 Guests: 192.168.60.0/24 Cameras: 192.168.70.0/24 WireGuard VPN: 192.168.90.0/28
SSIDs → VLAN Mapping TheNerdery → Trusted TheNerdery-Work → Work TheNerdery-IoT → IoT TheNerdery-Cameras → Cameras TheNerdery-Guest → Guest
Containers / Services (LXCs)
Infrastructure / Ops UniFi Network Application Pi-hole (backup instance) Proxmox Backup Server Portainer Ansible Homepage dashboard OpenWebUI
Media & Automation Plex SABnzbd Sonarr Radarr Lidarr Prowlarr Bazarr Kometa Notifiarr Recyclarr Huntarr
What I’m Looking For Feedback On
What would you do with ~150 GB of mostly idle RAM? Any services you’ve found genuinely useful at this scale? Is it worth experimenting with local LLMs (I’m a consultant), or is this still mostly novelty unless you go bigger? Alternatively: would you downsize now and repurpose the cash elsewhere?
Appreciate any perspectives.
