Hey there selfhosted community.
I had big plans when I moved last year to finally setup my homelab with proper VLAN seperation. Well a stressfull move later I simply had no energy left and just threw my whole homelab and all my services in my main LAN with no seperation whatsoever.
In how much of a world of pain am I in now when I want to switch my homelab services over in a seperate VLAN? Any recomendations or pointers to documentation for me to go through before I decide if this is something I want to do right now?
Currently this would impact a proxmox host with 3 VM’s and 1 LXC and around 20 docker images.
I would say there’s solid benefits to breaking out your networking into at least 4 VLANs: IoT, guest, main, and infrastructure. IoT is obvious, these devices are security nightmares, but sometimes you have no alternative so you throw them into a network black hole. Guest for guests that you don’t want touching your stuff but keep asking for wifi. Main is for everybody else, this is your “real” network. Infrastructure for servers and network equipment.
The reason you break infrastructure off into its own VLAN is that modern firewalls are stateful and you can allow the main VLAN to initiate connections to the infrastructure VLAN but not the other way around, so if your server or IoT stuff gets infected it can’t become an attack vector for all your other devices. You allow Main to access Infrastructure, but not vise versa.
I take mine further and add two more VLANs, services and admin access. I split infrastructure (networking, proxmox hosts, etc) and services (proxmox VMs, NAS, etc) and then only allow admin access to the former, which is exclusive to my PC and phone. Some might call this excessive, but it helps me sleep a little better at night.