Contrary to popular belief, home labs don’t require a lot of investment. Containerization distros, for instance, can deliver solid performance on SBCs, while Proxmox and OpenMediaVault pair well with budget-friendly systems and outdated PCs. But once you’ve dipped your feet into the wondrous world of home servers, you might find your barebones setup rather unimpressive before eventually succumbing to the curse of wanting new hardware for your experimentation lab. So, here’s my curated list of the best home lab equipment that, despite being optional, can bring some quality-of-life improvements to your setup.

Outdated PCs can serve as the crux of casual home labs and can handle a surprising number of virtualization projects, provided you don’t go wild with overprovisioning the hardware. That said, you’re better off relegating certain projects to separate computing rigs. For example, you could technically virtualize a backup server for your VMs and containers, though one botched experiment is all it takes for you to lose your virtual guests and their snapshots.

Likewise, a monitoring container is borderline useless if it goes down with the rest of your home lab. If you’re building a robust firewall for your home network, it’s better to stick to an SBC or mini-PC, as it's possible to bring down your Internet connection should you mess up a DIY project while hosting the router OS on your home lab.