Proxmox Homelab Server Project

Start Date: October 2025

This is a full documentation and history of an ongoing personal homelab server project that I started in my 3rd year of university. I began researching about hypervisors, virtualization, VMs, and server administration after a group member in a course I took piqued my interest. Prior to this project, I had never been exposed to virtualization, RAID configurations, hypervisors, or homelabbing as a whole. I did have prior experience with UNIX commands and file structure, Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition, networking protocols and IP-reservations, basic firewall configuration, PC building and computer architecture, and rudimentary file storage using Samba.

Original Goals

• Set up ProxmoxVE with two VMs running a file-server and a game-hosting-server, respectively.
• Configure two or more HDDs in RAID 1 (mirroring) for data redundancy in the event of a drive failure. This is not acting in place of a proper backup cycle, but rather solely as an extra form of protection against loss of data. Backups will still be done to external drives for long-term cold storage.
• Set up a VPN for secure access to the server outside of my local home network via ssh (e.g. when I'm on campus).

Milestones

1. game-server (1st iteration) | completed on 10/27/2025
2. VPN | completed on 10/29/2025
3. file-server (1st iteration) | completed on 10/30/2025
4. RAID 1 (ZFS Pool) | completed on 10/30/2025
5. Jellyfin media server | completed on 1/22/2026
6. game-server (2nd iteration) | completed on 2/19/2026
7. file-server (2nd iteration) | completed on 5/8/2026
8. Immich media server | completed on 5/8/2026
9. game-server (3rd iteration) | completed on 8/19/2026

Documentation Overview

There are two files in this repository for additional in-depth information about this project.

• See the Full Progress Log for the timeline of updates and progress made on this project.
• See the Hardware Specifications Log for the original full spec-sheet for this project as well as a timeline of all hardware changes.
• See the Network Setup Diagram for a visualization of the underlying infrastructure of the network.

Thanks for reading! ~ Jason Yi