By Oliver Haslam
Publication Date: 2026-05-03 14:30:00
There’s something cool about running a home lab. Maybe you have a small rack full of servers, whirring away as they do their thing. But not all of us have the space for such hardware-based luxury, and then there’s the cost of electricity, not to mention the heat servers can kick out. Thankfully, you don’t need to fill your home with servers to enjoy yourself. I love my virtual machine-based home lab, and it runs everything from my smart home to photo backups for my family.
There are tons of benefits to choosing the virtualized route rather than the physical one. I’ve already covered a few of them, but there’s a key one that often gets overlooked. I regularly find myself down a rabbit hole of some new self-hosted service. If I were using physical servers, I might need to buy new hardware before I can play around with it. Not so with virtualization. I can spin up a new virtual machine (VM) in seconds, ready to start the fun. That’s how I wound up running some of the VMs that I use today; here’s a rundown of the VMs I couldn’t be without.