Field notes from a homelab that costs
real money to run.
A walk-through of an automated golden-image pipeline for vSphere: HashiCorp Packer builds six Ubuntu LTS templates (22.04, 24.04, 26.04 — server and desktop) driven by three GitHub Actions workflows covering PR validation, parallel template builds, and ISO management via a self-hosted runner.
In this post I’ll walk through how I use vSphere Power Management driven by Ansible and SemaphoreUI to automatically reduce ESXi host electricity consumption — saving real money on my Octopus Agile tariff by toggling hosts between Low Power and Balanced policies. Introduction One of the larger costs of running my homelab is the electricity….
One Bash script turns a fresh Ubuntu VM into a VCF 9 Offline Depot: Traefik, Nginx, basic auth, and Let’s Encrypt wildcard certs via Cloudflare DNS.
Part 2 of my self-hosted AI stack series. I cover container resource sizing, dual-network isolation via Traefik and Cloudflare Tunnels, and every database powering the stack — PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, Qdrant, MinIO, MongoDB, SQLite, Prometheus, and Jaeger — plus the backup strategy for each.
We’ve expanded the VMC fleet with the new i7i (i7i.
A walkthrough of my self-hosted AI stack: Ollama, Open WebUI, ComfyUI, Whishper, n8n, Qdrant, SearxNG, and a full observability layer — all running on my own hardware with Docker Compose.
I am quite a heavy consumer of electricity at home. This is primarily driven by my lab but having a young son and two golden retrievers means more washing and drying.
Learn how to use Ansible to configure an Ubuntu VM for use with NVIDIA based AI workloads in vSphere
How to leverage Content Libraries to deploy into VMware Cloud on AWS faster.
I have spent the Christmas break making some improvements to this blog.