What do you use your home lab for?

This sub inspired me to start my own home lab journey and I’m curious as to what everyone else’s use cases are. I don’t have much hardware, and most of my use cases are fine with what I have. I always see tons of massive servers and switches on here and I’m really just curious what everyone is up to! How much of your lab is practical vs fun?

My background: I’m a cybersecurity professional and I’ve been building some projects recently and looking to get into self hosting some of my websites too.

Current Hardware:

• PC (intel i7, 32gb ram, 1tb ssd, 2x 1tb HDD
• Dell Optiplex 7050 (intel i5, 16gb ram, 256gb ssd)
• Macbook pro (intel i5, 8gb ram, 512 ssd)
• New Macbook pro (M4 pro, 24gb ram, 512ssd)
• old raspberry pi

I just recently setup proxmox on the dell optiplex to start experimenting and learning w that as i get into self hosting some of my sites. I run Wazuh for a free SIEM/EDR using docker and the server and indexer runs on the optiplex with agents on all the above. Lots of VMs for offsec experiments. I’m pretty sure most Linux hosts are also able to act as a NAS which I’m looking at. Also looking at setting up a personal VPN to connect to while away from home, would love to experiment with some old routers I have too - maybe a segmented guest network or honeypot depending on limitations.

All this to say - I don’t have too much hardware, but I think I have a decent bit of projects going on and whenever I see more hardware than I have, I’m always curious if its due to larger projects, more quantity of projects, projects with users which require more compute or storage, etc.

If you made it this far - thanks!