Well, as I said before the site looks different! I'm using Pelican to generate my content as static pages, which then get uploaded via ssh. It means my website has a much lighter load than before, and I automatically have a local backup since the files are on my desktop computer rather than all on a server. Later I'll get a git repo set up on SourceHut so I have all my content readily available. However, that's not what this post is about.
Since my last post, I haven't really made major changes to my lab, not yet. However, I've made plans so that I can start on those as soon as I'm happy with my new apartment setup itself. All I've done so far is installed DNS and DHCP on my Liva X2, which has been reinstalled with CentOS so my lab will be more consistent when it's all set up. Nothing is connected to it yet, I'm actually a bit scared to test it out, but hopefully it's a good start to my refresh. I've also purchased a low-power Lenovo ThinkCentre M92p, which is running a low-power i5 and 8 GB of memory for now. So far I haven't imaged it yet, but I still need to find a use for it. Either that or my Asus VivoPC will become a storage server more likely than not, replacing my Liva in that capacity but providing simple NFS mounts for the rest of my lab. Most likely, this is where my VMs will have most of their storage, although I'll still provision small disks for them local to my Optiplex VM host.
As for the big guns, that Optiplex I mentioned, it's also getting re-imaged soon. I'm moving forward with ESXi in order to keep my lab closer to industry standards. Proxmox was fun to mess around with, but since this lab is for learning and training I need it to be closer to the real deal. At some point in the future I may switch to Proxmox or Ovirt, but that's only if ESXi starts getting too heavy for me. I talked to some of the experts at work and they claim that it's okay for me to over-provision CPU cores as long as they're not constantly in demand, so most likely I'll start spinning up multiple smaller VMs for things like a local git server or a mail host.
Overall, my lab is getting a pretty major overhaul. All or almost all of the machines are being re-purposed or re-imaged, and the network backbone is much closer to what I've used at work. For now most of my lab is going to be manually managed, but once the basics are done I hope to start looking into automation through IPAM and Ansible.