Well, it happened again to my old lab, another server died and I decided to move to a lower power solution for my Proxmox lab instead. I am still using a three host configuration but this time I used Dell Optiplex 7070 Micro Form Factor PCs. I also have a new purpose in mind for this lab. At least initially, I am going to use it mainly for my Pluralsight courses, and for my new business venture called Cybrid Technology LLC.
Each host has 8 cores for CPU, 500GB of SSD space, and I upgraded the RAM to 32 GB each. This gives me enough computing power to get started at least. The specifications of each are in the image below.
Getting Started With The New Proxmox Lab
As you can see from the images, I already started, and I am not going to repeat the guidelines around the basics of setting up Proxmox. For that, I refer you to some of my older posts:
I set up new templates in this lab. If you couldn’t tell from the image, this is what I created now:
- Windows 11
- Windows Server 2022
- Windows Server 2025
- Ubuntu 24.04.2 Server
- Ubuntu 24.04.2 Desktop
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.5 Server
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.5 Desktop
This time I am going to use Terraform to create the machines, and plan to use Ansible as well for configuration. That is a topic for another post though. To create each of the templates I took these actions:
- Install the operating system
- Install all available updates
- Configure remote administration for servers
- Set the timezone and time
- Configure the local admin for all machines
- Sysprep the machine using either the sysprep.exe for Windows machines or virtio-sysprep for the Linux machines.
Thanks for reading and following. This environment is much quieter and uses a lot less power than my previous setup. I am looking forward to getting started with it and putting out some new content along the way.