Balor3
Hardware

The equipment behind Balor3.

Compact gear, chosen for low power draw and a small footprint rather than maximum specification. Open a card for the detail.

Main node Minisforum UM750L Slim The core compute box, running Proxmox VE and carrying the always-on workload.

A small system carrying the main homelab role without needing a large always-on tower. Everything that has to stay up lives here.

  • Ryzen 5 7545U, 6 cores / 12 threads, up to 4.9GHz
  • 32GB DDR5 memory
  • 1TB SSD
  • 2.5Gb LAN / Ethernet
  • Proxmox VE — hosts the container and VM guests
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Second node Secondary Proxmox host Spare capacity and a place to break things without taking the main node down with them.

A second hypervisor running alongside the main node. Most of the time it idles; its real value is having somewhere to test an upgrade before it touches anything that matters.

  • Proxmox VE
  • Secondary hypervisor — spare capacity
  • Hosts a single guest at present
Storage UGREEN DH2300 NAS A two-bay NAS built around repurposed drives from older hardware rather than buying everything new.

Keeping storage separate from compute means the nodes stay disposable. Media is served from here rather than living on the hypervisor.

  • UGREEN DH2300 2-bay enclosure
  • 2 × 1TB HGST SSHDs
  • Drives repurposed from older hardware
  • Shares mounted by the media server
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Router UniFi Cloud Gateway Routing, firewall, and DHCP for the whole network, with DNS handed off to Pi-hole.

The edge of the network. Everything inbound stops here, and nothing is port-forwarded — remote access goes over Tailscale and Twingate instead.

  • Routing, firewall, and DHCP
  • DNS delegated to Pi-hole
  • Two wireless networks
  • Single flat LAN
Network TP-Link Gigabit Switch A straightforward switching layer for the lab without overcomplicating the network side.

Kept intentionally simple so the rest of the setup stays easy to reason about and maintain.

  • Gigabit switching
  • Main wired link for the lab gear
  • Unmanaged — no VLANs to debug at 1am
Product page
Main PC Desktop system The larger machine beside the lab, with stronger compute, GPU power, and more local storage.

Used for day-to-day work and the heavier tasks that do not need to live on the always-on node.

  • Intel i9-10850K, 10 cores / 20 threads
  • 16GB DDR4 3200MHz
  • ASUS TUF RTX 3080 12GB
  • 1TB Samsung 970 EVO + 2TB P510
Intel Core i9-10850K ASUS TUF RTX 3080 12GB
Next

What runs on all this

The hardware is the boring half. The services are the interesting one.

See the service stack See the network map