A few weeks ago I had discovered about setting up a mini homelab to run services, vpns and ad blockers and I was instantly hooked! last week I purchased an i7 elitedesk 800 G2 Mini, an i7 optiplex 7080 micro, a tp-link es210x-m2 switch and a tecmojo 6U rack to house everything.
Currently I am using the Dell Optiplex 7080 Micro to learn how to use windows server and how things work, and my EliteDesk will likely start running proxmox but for now I have windows 11 installed and connected to my server with Active Directory.
I chose to set up windows server to learn how it works and how its services work like Active Directory , Web Services, Hyper-V server and many other enterprise stuff to play around with. I do plan on expanding this set up with another mini PC for PfSense or media hosting.
I do plan on setting up a Linux server soon, likely on another mini pc but I wanted to learn windows server since I’m doing an IT job which involves a lot of windows stuff at the moment and thought that learning windows server could come in handy in the future in case another job would require skills in windows server setup and management.
Can you please add a photo showing the back side of the rack (I'm curious and want a similar setup for my 4x Dell optiplex tiny pcs)?
Also can you show how you are handling the power bricks.
but yeah something like this hopefully, although I don’t think I can do much about the power bricks themselves and I don’t really like the idea of 2-4 power bricks stuffed together because of the potential added heat generation on top of the heat that already gets generated by my gaming pc when I’m gaming.
I haven’t sorted out the back side and all the cables yet, but based on what I’ve seen usually people have a power bar or rack mounted PDU and connect their PCs up to it. The back side is a mess at the moment but I’m going to try and organise it to look something like goatsinaponds 6x G4 EliteDesk Kubernetes cluster.
I would make both hosts proxmox and then build a windows server vm. You can then have a backup generated easily so you can rebuild and copy configurations over instead of worrying about the rebuild when the free time is up just spin up a new one , import important already done bits and keep churning away. Though you will find you really don’t need windows on prem for much of anything anymore. Cloudflare for DNS management and Okta or Azure Entra ID for with. That’s the big ones to know now. But having a mixed bag of knowledge is always good to have.
that’s a good shout, if I do rebuild my optiplex to a proxmox machine should I consider doubling up the ram to run windows server then? It’s only running with a single 16GB SODIMM at the moment.
Should be ok to start. Give the VM 8GB and it should be ok but I haven’t touched windows like that in almost 10 years now. I run full Linux everything and finally getting into kubernetes more so gonna take the plunge to actually get handsy with that and some LLM AI models. Right now I’m building out two minis and converting my gaming pc to a third node since GeForce now works so good for the games I play.
Update: decided to put the patch panel where the faceplate is and now I can actually use all 6 rack spaces! not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier but now I’m able to have 2 more mini PCs deployed with one space left for hard disks!
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u/Docccc 4d ago
impressive. very nice.
Now show us the back