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Everything else on this site assumes you already know what a hypervisor is. These pages don’t. A homelab is a small set of computers you run yourself, at home. It hosts the software you’d otherwise rent from someone else: photo storage, dashboards, a password manager, a media library, monitoring for your own network. People build them for three reasons that usually arrive in this order: curiosity, then cost, then control. Curiosity gets you the first machine. Cost keeps you going when you notice how many monthly subscriptions one box replaces. Control is the one that lasts. Your data stays on hardware you can hold in your hand. Nothing gets discontinued because a company changed direction. The tradeoff is real and worth saying plainly: you become the operations team. When it breaks at 2 AM, nobody else is paged. Most of what’s described in these pages exists to make that happen less often, and to make it recoverable when it does.

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Start here

What a hypervisor is

How one physical machine safely pretends to be many separate ones.

Clusters and quorum

Why several machines are joined together, and why the count is odd.

Staying up when a machine dies

Backup, replication and failover are three different things.

One login for everything

What single sign-on actually does, and why it’s safer than it sounds.

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The shape of it

Four layers, each depending on the one below. Most homelab problems are a layer confusion: a networking problem being debugged as an app problem, or vice versa. Physical machines are the actual computers. The hypervisor is the software that divides each one into isolated slices. Guests are those slices, each behaving like its own computer. Applications are what you actually wanted: the photo library, the dashboard.
Throughout these pages, internal names appear as placeholders: example.local for the internal domain, node-a and node-b for machines. That’s deliberate: the concepts are the point, and publishing a real map of a private network isn’t.

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Where to go next

Infrastructure overview

The technical view of the same stack, once these pages make sense.

How it fits together

The public surfaces and how they connect.