Homelab and Virtualization in 2025

Greg Heffner July 26, 2025

Hey y'all, I wanted to share how you can experiment at home with relatively inexpensive computers and solutions, while still being able to test the latest trends and releases.

This is an add-on to the network build I wrote about earlier.

Not everyone has the money, space, or (fill in the blank) to own and run their own server at home. Some people don't want to deal with the power draw or heat generated by servers. Personally, I don't like the noise from all the fans.

Luckily, you don't need top-of-the-line hardware to learn and test things at home.

For a small homelab, the first thing you need is a strong computer. If you aren't going to buy a prebuilt server for a specific purpose, you'll need to put one together that meets your needs. You need something with enough cores, RAM, and disk space to run the number of virtual machines you're planning for. I like the small form factor of ASUS NUCs—they're about the size of two sandwiches stacked together and are super quiet. (Apologies for the technical description!) You can find deals online, but I tend to buy from Amazon for these. It meets a lot of my specs with about 32 GB RAM, 24 cores, and 1 TB disk space. The downside is that it's not cheap.

Knowing your system's minimum requirements is important when building a homelab, so you don't overutilize your hardware and create bottlenecks. For Ubuntu, my OS of choice due to size and use case, you can run a virtual server with as little as 2 cores, 2 GB of RAM, and 25 GB of disk.

For virtualization (running virtual machines on your NUC), I use ESXI. Many of my peers also like ProxMox, I just haven't made the leap yet. Both are free. You'll need to reimage the NUC with the ISO of your chosen virtualization solution. Here is a video on the installation that's relatively new. An ISO is a digital file that is an exact copy of an entire optical disk, such as a CD, DVD, or Blu-ray.

Ok, so you have your own hypervisor now! Look at you go. If you chose ESXI, your host will look something like my image above! Now let's get some virtual machines going. Depending on your use case, this is where builds will start to be unique.

If you want a couple of physical machines that aren't VMs but can still run an OS like Ubuntu, I recommend a small form factor computer like this. I've purchased a couple of them and for around $100, they are a steal! Remember your OS's minimum specs when deciding what's right for you.

Once you have your VMs and/or physical boxes running and online, you'll most likely want to enable monitoring and metrics. There are quite a few different routes to take, but what I recommend is Datadog. According to their website, "Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform for large-scale applications and infrastructure." You might be thinking, "large-scale and SaaS-based? Is this overkill?" But remember, you're building a homelab to train and test for real-world use...

For free, Datadog offers monitoring for up to 5 hosts and 24 hours of metric retention. Perfect for a NUC running a few VMs and some external devices. I personally use it for one VM and three physical hosts (my K8s cluster).

I chose Datadog over other solutions because of its many integrations, powerful alerting, and great error visualization.

You can use Datadog to monitor K8s clusters or Docker images running on your devices. You can monitor network usage and, in my case, NGINX pod metrics related to this blog page.

You can monitor integrations like Cloudflare to check the health of your tunnels or applications, and create custom dashboards based on your needs with Datadog.

So you may ask yourself, "Why? What are you doing? What's the plan?" Honestly... anything! What are you doing to learn? You can host, build, and test Docker images. You can run Python scripts and test your coding and automation skills. Learn Bash or just how to traverse a Linux file system. And if you don't like Ubuntu, you now have a device that can host other OSes. You can find an ISO online from a place you trust and spin up the installer on your hypervisor.

Check out some of the other things I have set up and the ways you can learn at home:

• Learn automated patching with Ansible: LINK HERE
• Learn how to make dotfiles and backup configs: LINK HERE
• Load test webpages: LINK HERE
• Host a Kubernetes Cluster and Webpage: LINK HERE