One of the questions I got several times is about what hardware I am actually running.
You don’t need enterprise servers to run production infrastructure. The compact 8U rack sitting under my desk handles everything I need. This isn’t a buyer’s guide with exhaustive tier comparisons. Instead, I want to share my actual setup—the mini server rack that transformed my homelab, the mini workstation that became my primary workhorse, and the lessons learned from building infrastructure that people depend on daily.
The Rack That Accommodates It All#
This compact rack represents the current state of my homelab. It didn’t start here.
My self-hosting journey began a long time ago with a single custom-built desktop PC running 24/7. It handled almost everything—Plex, Immich, Tailscale, file serving, development environments, external hard disk backup, etc. Then I added a Synology NAS, which turned out to be a very good addition. Network storage with proper backups changed how I thought about data persistence.
As workloads grew, I connected old computers lying around my house to form a cluster. The infrastructure expanded organically, but without intentional organization. Equipment spread across shelves and desk space. Cables became tangled. It worked, but it didn’t feel like infrastructure I could be proud of.
Then, a GeeekPi 8U Server Rack transformed everything. Most of the hardware now sits in this rack - a Minisforum MS-01 mini workstation, a 4-bay Synology NAS, a network switch, power splitters, a Hue smart hub, all properly mounted with clean cable management. An old laptop and the desktop are still connected to the cluster for high availability, but they sit outside the rack. Eventually, I’ll replace them with additional mini workstations, and the entire infrastructure will be contained in this compact frame. That’s the goal: production-quality infrastructure in a form factor that fits in a small space.
The 8U height is perfect—tall enough for proper equipment mounting, compact enough without dominating the room. The open-frame design provides natural airflow, so I’ve never needed rack fans. Cable management inside forces me to be intentional about organization. When everything has a proper mount point, you think twice before adding random hardware sprawl.
The portability is another advantage I didn’t fully appreciate until I needed it. I can unplug the entire rack—one power cable, one network cable—and move it to a different location. Plug it back in, and everything works exactly the same, regardless of which internet provider or network I’m connecting to. Internally, everything is connected together, so the clean external wiring—just those two cables—belies the full mesh of connectivity inside the rack.
One detail I appreciate: the GeeekPi rack is extensible. If I need more space in the future, I can stack additional 4U or 8U units to create a 12U or 16U rack. This modularity means I’m not locked into the current capacity. As my infrastructure needs grow—more mini workstations, a UPS, additional networking gear—I can expand vertically without replacing the rack.
Inside the rack, I mounted a DIGITUS 4-way power strip and added GeeekPi DeskPi RackMate shelves to hold the Synology NAS and network switch. For clean cable routing, I added an Ianberg 1U fixed drawer and a DIGITUS cable entry panel. Short Cat6a patch cables (0.5m and 1m) keep everything tidy. A few UGREEN USB-C cables handle peripheral connections.
The total rack infrastructure cost about €210, but the operational value is enormous. Physical organization creates mental clarity. When you walk up to a professional-looking rack instead of a pile of equipment on a shelf, you treat it like production infrastructure. This discipline carries over to how you architect and maintain the cluster.
Rack Setup Inspiration#
Before I bought my own rack, I spent time looking at other people’s setups to understand what worked well. Here are a few examples that inspired my design:
Sources:
- Consolidating mini things in the GeeekPi rack
- Tiny Homelab Server Rack: Mini but Mighty
- Jeff Geerling’s Mini Rack Project
- Complete HomeLab - Proxmox, TrueNAS, Firewall, KVM, and of course RGB
- ITX Dense Compute with external UPS
The minimalist approach: Some builders mount just a mini PC, NAS, and switch with clean cable routing. The simplicity is beautiful—every cable has a purpose, nothing is hidden poorly. This style prioritizes accessibility for maintenance.
The dense configuration: Others pack their 8U rack with multiple mini PCs on shelves, a patch panel, managed switches with VLANs, and even with a small UPS. These setups maximize the rack’s capacity while maintaining organization. The key insight here is using every 1U strategically.
The professional aesthetic: Some setups incorporate brush panels, proper cable management arms, and uniform equipment colors (all black or all silver). These racks look like they belong in a datacenter, just scaled down. The visual consistency signals operational maturity.
These setups confirm that the 8U height is the sweet spot for homelab density. Smaller racks feel cramped when you add even modest equipment. Larger racks (12U+) create pressure to fill empty space with unnecessary hardware. The 8U forces intentional choices about what deserves rack mounting.
The Minisforum MS-01: My Primary Workhorse#
The heart of my setup is a Minisforum MS-01 configured with an Intel Core i9-12900H, 48GB DDR5 RAM, and 1TB NVMe storage.
Why Minisforum? I’ve watched this brand evolve over the past few years. They’re doing something unique in the mini PC space—designing machines specifically for infrastructure use cases rather than just shrinking desktop PCs. The MS-01 has dual 2.5GbE NICs and dual 10GbE NICs, proper server-grade memory support, multiple M.2 slots, and a thermal design that handles sustained workloads without throttling. It’s clear they understand what engineers need.
The i9-12900H with its 14 cores (6 performance, 8 efficiency) is more than enough for my current needs. The CPU rarely becomes the bottleneck. What matters more for my setup is RAM—running Proxmox with multiple VMs simultaneously means memory capacity directly determines how many workloads I can run. The 48GB gives me comfortable headroom, but I’d like to max it out at 96GB with another 48GB module. Unfortunately, DDR5 SO-DIMM prices are still crazy high right now. I’m waiting for prices to drop before adding the second module.
Thermal performance is solid—no additional cooling required. The acoustic profile is dominated by the spinning disks in the Synology rather than the mini workstation itself, good for home office environments where traditional server equipment would be disruptive.
Minisforum has proven itself as a serious option for infrastructure work. Their mini workstations deliver the performance, build quality, and thermal characteristics needed for sustained production workloads without the operational overhead of traditional server equipment. The newer models—MS-02, MS-A2, and MS-S1 MAX—continue this trajectory with improved computing power and expansion capabilities.
Proxmox and Kubernetes#
Here’s how the infrastructure actually works: I run three physical machines as Proxmox nodes, and those Proxmox nodes host multiple VMs that form my K3s cluster. This virtualization layer gives me flexibility to create, destroy, and reconfigure K3s nodes without touching physical hardware.
The Minisforum MS-01: My primary Proxmox node. It runs several VMs—some as K3s control plane and worker nodes, others for specific services. Beyond the cluster infrastructure, I also run dedicated Linux development environment VMs and Windows VMs for different use cases I need. The 48GB RAM lets me run many VMs simultaneously without memory pressure.
The old laptop (ASUS K43SM): My second Proxmox node. This laptop has been with me for a long time and I no longer use it as a daily driver. It has modest power consumption, and stays within thermal limits. It hosts lighter VMs for logging, DNS, and monitoring services.
The desktop with GPU: My third Proxmox node, which exists primarily because it has a GPU that I need for AI and ML workloads. At work, I architect ML pipelines for medical imaging systems—training models for 3D image segmentation and registration on AWS and company’s servers, and optimizing inference performance. At home, this machine lets me experiment with GPU-accelerated model training, test ML workloads, and validate deployment strategies. The GPU makes it essential for my professional development.
On asymmetric nodes: In practice, heterogeneous clusters are common. Different hardware specs, thermal profiles, and capabilities are normal in production Kubernetes environments. Node selectors, taints, and tolerations exist precisely to handle this reality. With proper planning, you can run workloads efficiently across diverse hardware. The laptop handles lightweight pods, the MS-01 runs memory-intensive services, and the desktop takes GPU workloads. It works.
That said, I do want to replace the laptop and desktop with additional mini workstations eventually. Not because asymmetric nodes are inherently problematic, but because a more symmetric setup would let me build a high-performance cluster with fast networking between nodes. With dual 10GbE NICs on each machine, I could create a dedicated backend network for storage traffic and cluster communications, keeping management and application traffic separate. That network topology becomes much cleaner with symmetric hardware.
The other benefit: replacing the bulky laptop and desktop with compact mini PCs means the entire infrastructure fits in a single 8U rack. Everything rack-mounted, properly organized, occupying minimal space. That’s the end goal—production-grade infrastructure in the smallest footprint possible.
Storage: The Synology NAS#
A Synology DS923+ with 2x 8TB drives provides all persistent storage for the cluster. The DS923+ has four drive bays, so I have room for expansion as storage needs grow. This is the infrastructure component I wish I’d bought sooner.
The NAS market has evolved since I bought my Synology—brands like Ugreen are now offering competitive alternatives with compelling hardware specs and pricing. Synology’s value proposition remains its software ecosystem. DiskStation Manager (DSM) provides enterprise features—NFS, snapshots, incremental backups, and application packaging—with consumer-friendly management interfaces. For production workloads, software maturity and operational reliability outweigh raw hardware specifications.
K3s includes local storage out of the box, and that works fine for experimentation. But when you’re running production services that people depend on—Immich storing 200,000 family photos, Plex serving media, databases that hold real data—you need network storage with proper backup capabilities.
The Synology runs NFS out of the box and integrates cleanly with Kubernetes CSI drivers. I configure PersistentVolumes that let pods migrate between nodes without losing data. The built-in snapshot capabilities protect against data loss, and Synology’s RAID configuration means a single drive failure doesn’t take down my infrastructure.
Here’s the clever part: the DS923+ isn’t just storage. It has enough CPU and RAM to run a VM that can serve as another Proxmox node if I want. I can also run other apps directly on the Synology—for example, using it as a Tailscale node that advertises subnets and works as an exit node. The hardware capability means it can handle multiple roles beyond just being a NAS.
Network Infrastructure#
A Gigabit switch ties everything together. At the moment, I’m only using a simple TP-Link switch-nothing fancy, but reliable. I also added a GL.iNet GL-MT3000 (Beryl AX) travel router to my gears for secure remote access when I’m away from home.
Short patch cables keep the rack tidy. Quality Cat6a cables in the exact lengths you need (0.5m, 1m) are worth the extra cost over cheap bulk cables you have to coil up.
Power Consumption: The Real Operating Cost#
My electricity consumption runs less than €20 per month. This figure includes only the hardware visible in the rack photos—the MS-01, the Synology NAS, the network switch, and the Hue smart hub. It does not include the laptop and the desktop PC. I track actual wattage with a Tapo smart plug that logs consumption over time.
The MS-01 is remarkably efficient for its performance. The Synology is power-efficient by design.
Compare this to AWS EKS: the control plane alone runs over €70 monthly, and that’s before adding any compute nodes or storage. A modest EKS setup with a couple of workers and reasonable storage easily runs several hundred euros per month. My homelab paid for itself in under a year of equivalent AWS costs. After that, every month represents significant savings while giving me hardware I own and infrastructure I control completely.
Lessons from Building This#
Start with the rack: Even if you’re only mounting one device initially, the physical infrastructure creates operational discipline. The GeeekPi 8U is affordable and sets you up for future expansion without looking ridiculous with a single piece of equipment inside.
Invest in the primary node: I could have bought three cheaper old mini PCs for the same cost as one MS-01. But having one truly capable machine as the primary node means I never hit performance limitations during experimentation. The other nodes can be more modest-or even repurposed equipment.
Don’t skip the NAS: Local storage works until you need to migrate a pod and realize all its data is stuck on the original node. Network storage with proper backup capabilities is worth the investment if you’re running services people depend on.
Power consumption matters: Before buying equipment, calculate the actual operating cost. A machine that draws 100W more than necessary costs you an extra €120+ annually. Over three years, that’s significant money that could have bought better hardware upfront.
The hardware matters less than you think. What matters is treating your homelab like production infrastructure—monitoring before you need it, automating backups before you lose data, documenting before you forget your architectural decisions.
My GeeekPi rack, Minisforum MS-01, and Synology NAS aren’t special. They’re good hardware operated with discipline. Running production workloads on infrastructure you own and maintain develops the kind of operational maturity that makes a difference in production environments.