PROJECT CITADEL

Citadel

Where ideas learn their place. A dedicated laboratory for infrastructure, virtualization, self-hosting, and every experiment that deserves room to grow before it earns a permanent place inside The Vault.

Mission Brief

ACTIVE

Every Lab Needs A Purpose.

Citadel wasn't created because The Vault was failing. It was created because it had become too successful.

Over the years The Vault evolved into the beating heart of my homelab. Media streaming, storage, web hosting, self-hosted applications, experimentation, virtualization and countless background services all competed for the same pool of resources.

Eventually the solution became obvious. Stop asking one machine to do everything. Let every system become exceptional at what it was built to do.

The Vault will continue doing what it does best. High-performance storage. GPU accelerated media. Long-term reliability.

Citadel exists to carry everything else. Infrastructure. Docker. Virtual machines. Domains. Experiments. The ideas that haven't found their permanent home... yet.

Classification

Personal Laboratory

Current Status

Online

Primary Objective

Separate infrastructure from media workloads.

Philosophy

Play to the strengths of both.

System Architecture

Why Citadel Exists

The best infrastructure isn't built by making one machine do everything. It's built by allowing every machine to excel at the work it was designed to perform.

The Vault

The archive. Long-term storage. Media. GPU accelerated workloads. Fast. Reliable. Always available.

Plex Media Server

ErsatzTV

Long-Term Storage

RTX 4000 Ada Workloads

Media Library

Citadel

The laboratory. Infrastructure. Virtualization. Self-hosting. The place where ideas are tested before they become part of the permanent homelab.

Proxmox

Docker Containers

Virtual Machines

Aethercloud Domain

Future Experiments

Mission Control

Current Operations

Every service inside Citadel exists for a reason. Some are production ready. Others are experiments waiting to prove themselves.

Aethercloud

Online

The public front door into the homelab. A place where every project eventually finds its story.

Proxmox

Active

The backbone underneath Project Citadel. Every virtual machine and every future container begins here.

Ubuntu VM

Testing

A sandbox for new ideas. New software lands here first. If it survives... it graduates.

Cloudflare Tunnel

Connected

Secure external access without opening ports to the internet. Quietly doing its job in the background.

Infrastructure

The Foundation

Every experiment needs a stable foundation. Before new ideas can be explored, the infrastructure itself has to disappear into the background and simply work.

Compute

HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9

Dual Xeon E5-2690 v3
Enterprise virtualization platform.

Virtualization

Proxmox VE

Ubuntu testing environment. Future Docker workloads. Future virtual machines.

Networking

2.5 Gigabit Backbone

Cloudflare Tunnel
Enterprise switching.

Mission

Offload infrastructure from The Vault. Leave media and storage where they belong. Build smarter. Not bigger.

Blueprint

Planned Upgrades

Citadel isn't finished. That's exactly why it exists. Every upgrade below represents another lesson waiting to be learned.

Dual Xeon E5-2699 v4

Replace the current processors with the fastest CPUs officially supported by the platform.

128GB Memory

Expand virtualization capacity and allow larger, more ambitious projects to coexist.

Enterprise SAS Storage

Populate the front bays with 1.2TB SAS drives designed for constant enterprise workloads.

10 Gigabit Networking

Upgrade the backbone and allow Citadel to fully stretch its legs.

Field Notes

Engineering Notes

Enterprise hardware has a habit of replacing assumptions with experience. These observations weren't learned from manuals. They were earned one deployment at a time.

Enterprise hardware doesn't care what worked on consumer hardware. It expects you to learn its language.

Observation 001

Every problem solved today becomes documentation for tomorrow. Future-you is another administrator. Leave them good notes.

Observation 002

Build around purpose. Not specifications. The best infrastructure isn't the biggest. It's the one where every machine knows exactly why it exists.

Observation 003

Curiosity is the most valuable component in the rack. Hardware gets replaced. Knowledge stays.

Observation 004

root@citadel:~# systemctl status curiosity.service ● curiosity.service Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/curiosity.service) Enabled: yes Active: active (running) Uptime: Infinite Downtime: None Since: 2026 Documentation: Internal Process: Building. Learning. Iterating. Current Objective: Continue separating infrastructure from media workloads. Next Deployment: Docker Services Future Expansion: 128GB Memory Dual Xeon E5-2699 v4 Enterprise SAS Storage 10 Gigabit Networking Status: Everything is working... Lets add some bullshit that breaks it. Again.