Home labbing is a process. When you first start, your lab is often put together with odds and ends you had sitting around, or seemingly inexpensive finds on eBay. But over time, that way of building turns into a mess, and you either get used to it or decide things need to change.

If you're in the former camp, you might be thinking that UniFi is too expensive to use for home lab equipment. It really isn't, especially if you go for the newer, non-rack-mount stuff, but that's beside the point here.

Once you get to the point of having a network rack or cabinet at home, haven't you already gone past the point of "overkill"? Most homes are content with their ISP-supplied router, and would consider anything more as surplus to their needs. My needs are different, and that's the point.

About this article: Ubiquiti supplied XDA with the hardware mentioned in this content, but did not see it before publication.

What is overkill, anyway?

Time for some level setting

When all I owned for my computing needs was a laptop, I was always dreaming of an overkill gaming PC. Now I've got that too, but it hasn't stopped me dreaming of bigger and better components. I never will, it's part of my DNA, and I'd still be doing the same things if I had any other job than this.

My home lab has grown in a similar fashion, from an Atom-powered NAS that really couldn't run services well, to a Xeon-powered one that I'm transitioning from, and now to a UniFi NAS that will be storage only, while the compute will be handled by mini PCs and a Threadripper-powered workstation.

So, I've already got an overkill gaming PC, and an overkill workstation/server that's designed to have future needs in scope. Is having an overkill networking setup really that far out of the ordinary for my tech stack? I didn't want to have to replace things for many years to come, and now I don't.

• UniFi Dream Machine Pro Max

  $599 at Official Site $599 at Amazon

• UniFi Pro XG 24 PoE

  $1799 at Official Site $1905 at B&H

• UniFi U7 Pro Wall

  $199 at Official Site $199 at Amazon

I wanted to right the wrongs of my previous setups

My home lab deserved better

I've committed some blunders along the way with my home lab, with most of them relating to future scaling. Like the managed network switch with 2.5 GbE ports that supported PoE, but only on some of those ports and didn't have a large enough overall PoE budget for the access points I wanted to use.

Or the six-bay Synology NAS that I stuffed so full of containerized services that it struggled to serve files when more than one user was connected. And the 12-port managed switch that had two 10 Gigabit SFP+, two 2.5 GbE RJ45, and eight gigabit ports, which seemed like a good idea at the time, because I only had a few non-gigabit devices, but it didn't take long to need more faster ports.

Now I have plenty of PoE+++ ports, and a few 25 GbE SFP28 ports to play with. The only thing missing is some QSFP ports for my cluster of DGX Spark units have 200 Gbps networking. UniFi doesn't have anything above 100 GbE at the moment, and I hope that changes because I don't want to put non-matching hardware into the rack now.

I mean, this stack of two Netgear 48-port switches I pulled off eBay is fun, and the use of HDMI as the stacking ports is still hilarious to me. But each of those ports are 1 GbE (yes, even the SFP ones), and that makes them less useful to me. They also didn't come with rack ears, which is an easy fix but still...

And my home lab up to this point was housed in an IKEA cabinet, the one that looks like a Tetris piece that looks like stairs. It didn't have enough space, and that limited me to what I could fit into the gaps. Now I have a couple of 1U racks that are unused for future expansion, plus two shelves for putting the mini PCs that are the heart of my home lab.

Having everything from one vendor brings advantages

But the one I appreciate the most is fewer power cables to the wall

Unifi has one of the best centrally managed network systems, and the more I work on my home lab, the more I appreciate simplifying things into one control surface. Whether that's firewall rules, DNS, my front door's video doorbell (and the NVR that records it), wireless APs, or anything else connected to this rack, it's all easily accessible.

Sure, now I have a folder on my iPhone for UniFi apps, but I've found I don't need most of them on a daily basis. And it's still a better solution than the previous folder of apps from a dozen different companies.

I'm also using the Redundant Power supply for my rack, which has 950W of battery backup to keep things running for a few minutes when the mains power disconnects. That's handy, but the thing I appreciate more is using the SmartPower cables to power all the rack-mounted devices, so I don't have an octopus of power cables going out of the rack. Most separate UPS units don't have enough sockets, and now I don't have to decide which things are going to be powered in case of an emergency power failure.

Home labs are whatever you want them to be

I haven't gotten to the stage of home lab life where I want to get rid of my mini datacenter and let someone else handle the infrastructure, but I also don't want to waste my time micromanaging every last piece of physical equipment. Switching to UniFi for the entire network stack was a decision to simplify management of one aspect of the home lab, so I can decide where my time is better spent. It might look like overkill from the outside, but my time is worth more than the way I was managing things.