Upgrading My Homelab

Recently I made a big quality of life change to my homelab. I’ve been using a HP Proliant ML110 G6 as my VM server for some time. I was running XCP-NG, an open source freely available version of XenServer. While this was mostly fine for my use case, the hardware was big, inefficient, old, and a little louder than I’d like, so I decided to finally upgrade.

After a little looking around I found that there were a lot of used small form factor desktops for a reasonable price. These are made mostly for office use, to reduce footprint, and usually have fairly low power requirements and noise, as they are usually deployed in large quantities in offices.

Eventually I settled on a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 Mini, a very small PC which can be held in one hand. The model I found has an i5-6500t, a 128GB M.2 SSD, and 8GB of DDR4 RAM. This was a perfect choice for my VM server as I don’t host a large amount of services at home, and mainly just needed something more lightweight and quiet.

I ended up installing Proxmox, like I have been using on my cloud dedicated server, and I now have a Docker host set up, along with a separate VM for Plex. I’ve been using this setup for a few days now and so far it seems as stable as before, with the added benefit of a nicer hypervisor administration setup, a smaller footprint, and much less noise. Overall, I’d say it was very much worth it, and would definitely recommend similar setups to anyone with similar requirements to me.