Planning My Home Lab

Today marks the beginning of my home lab. About a week ago I ordered a used HP EliteDesk 800 G2 small form factor PC from eBay. It cost me around $40 and is going to be the main server for my home lab.

The computer arrived in good condition and powered on with no issues. Before I did anything software related, I had to get my hardware sorted. The computer came with 8GB of DDR4 memory which worked out for me because I had two additional 16GB DDR4 sticks available from my old computer. Also, the computer didn’t come with any storage, so again repurposing from my old computer, I installed a 1TB SSD and 2TB HDD. Finally, I installed an Intel I350 NIC card which I purchased off eBay as well. This will give me four ethernet ports which is going to be crucial for what I have planned.

So, what do I have planned? A lot. Maybe more than I end up being able to do, but the main focus is as follows:

This is the base that I plan on building off of. I expect the topology to look completely different in a few months because there are several more VMs I would like to spin up and experiment with. First, I need to evaluate how well the server can handle running multiple machines simultaneously because the i5-6500 may not be able to keep up with all I want to do. For now, my next step is installing and setting up Proxmox VE on my home network.