This is where I break things on purpose.

The Home Lab is my personal proving ground for the ideas I talk about in the field: resilience, recovery, segmentation, visibility, misconfiguration, automation, and what actually happens when systems do not behave the way the diagram said they would.

It is a multi-hypervisor environment running VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Scale Computing HyperCore side by side. The goal is not to build something perfect. The goal is to test enterprise concepts at a scale where mistakes are cheap, recoverable, and useful.

The lab lets me explore questions that come up in customer conversations, workshops, and executive briefings:

• What breaks first when infrastructure is under stress?
• Can I recover cleanly after a bad change?
• What does the firewall actually see?
• Where does visibility disappear?
• How do automation and AI workflows change operational risk?
• Which assumptions only fail once the environment is real?

The environment includes Ubiquiti UniFi networking, Palo Alto Networks firewalling, Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam ONE, Kali Linux, n8n automation workflows, and MCP server experimentation. It gives me a place to test how infrastructure, security, recovery, automation, and emerging AI patterns interact in real conditions.

Every rebuild, misconfiguration, failed deployment, strange log entry, and “why is this not working?” moment has a purpose. Some of it turns into posts here, because one of the best ways to understand resilience is to occasionally cause an outage yourself., because the best way to understand resilience is to occasionally cause an outage yourself.

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What I Test Here

Resilience Under Stress

Failure scenarios, rebuilds, recovery testing, and lessons from systems that do not behave cleanly.

Network and Security Controls

Segmentation, firewall policy, traffic flow, visibility, Kali Linux testing, and what security tools actually see.

Multi-Hypervisor Recovery

How recovery, protection, and operational assumptions change across VMware, Hyper-V, and Scale environments.

Automation and AI Workflows

n8n workflows, MCP server experiments, agentic patterns, and the operational risks that appear when automation starts interacting with real infrastructure.

Field Questions

Technical experiments based on real customer conversations, workshops, executive briefings, and “what if” scenarios.

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The Stack

Compute 2x Minisforum MS-A2 3x Intel NUC 13 Pro i7 2x Intel NUC 12 Pro i7 1x Intel NUC 11 Pro i7	Virtualization VMware vSphere Microsoft Hyper-V Scale Computing HyperCore
Storage QNAP NAS	Network and Security Palo Alto Networks 440 Ubiquiti UniFi networking Kali Linux
Protection and Observability Veeam Backup & Replication Veeam ONE Splunk	Automation and AI Workflows n8n MCP server experiments OpenClaw