I run my homelab like a miniature data centre — here's the network design that made it possible

The homelab started flat. One /24, everything on it. My workstation, the NAS, the Proxmox host, and — over time — a growing list of workloads sharing the same broadcast domain because that was the path of least resistance. For a while, that was fine. A homelab running one workload doesn't need segmentation any more than a house needs an office door. Then I stood up an Akash provider. An Akash provider is, in shape, a Kubernetes cluster that accepts inbound tenant workloads from the internet — real deployments, paying for compute, containers I didn't write landing in namespaces on my hardware. The provider itself is documented at github.com/jjozzietech/akash-provider-ops-public — this piece is about the network underneath it. The containerisation posture itself is fine. I trust the isolation model. But trust isn't a network design. And the network at that moment had the tenant workload cluster sitting on the same subnet as my workstation, my NAS, and my Proxmox management interface. That was the moment I stopped thinking of the rack as a home network with extra boxes, and started thinking of it as a small data centre. This piece is the network design that came out of that shift. I'll cover the layout, the rules that hold it together, and the Nexus and Proxmox configs that anchor it — with the specifics of my own deployment sanitised. It's not a step-by-step replication guide. It's the design pattern, with enough of the shape to be useful and enough restraint to not double as a recon document for my own rack. // the original design The flat layout looked like this: home lan — 192.168.1.0/24 opnsense (perimeter) cisco nexus (dumb L2 switching) proxmox host workload VMs (all on the same subnet) What it got right: zero routing complexity, everything reachable from everywhere, fast to stand up. If you're running one project on a homelab, this is the correct design. Don't over-engineer it. What stopped working, as soon as the second project landed on the rack, was that the