In 27yrs of homelab addiction, I have set i486 BBS servers, ran Slackware 4, bought a sun SPARCstation for next to lunch money, because didn't run windows 98. And everything after... VMware GSX, ESX, ESXi, VSAN, hyperV, KVM, Xen, Citrix, Windows, Linux, networking: catalyst, procurve, powerconnect, force10, 3com, Mikrotik... I even had HP MSA1000, terramasters, qnap, freenas, truenas, Synology, xpenology... Storages.
Once had Citrix netscalers mpx7500 to play with, Kemp and even a very old F5 box.
Thinking about it... I have never had a "finished state" on any of my homelab iterations. Hence the title of the post...
Homelabs are as dynamic as the technology you are using it to learn... Never catching up.
I don't think that a homelab is ever ready...
What do you guys think? Ever finished a homelab? How long it lasted on the "finished state"?
I am about 25 years into the journey of doing IT more than just using a computer as a computer.
Early memories are having the side of my PC case open with IDE hard drives sticking out the side so that I had more storage.