Homelab - Proxmox Setup

As I mentioned in my prior post, I have started to play around with things tied to the idea of "homelab" setups.  I am not going to go into detail on what equipment I have, you can check out my other post here ( https://bigboystoys13.blogspot.com/2024/08/my-homelab-equipment.html ) for more information.

One of the cool things about the HP Envy desktop computer that I am using is that you can easily "hide" certain drives via the BIOS.  This makes it to do testing where you want to ensure certain drives can't be impacted.  I decided to setup Proxmox on my machine, while keeping the Windows OS available.

Here is my approach (my HP Envy had 4 internal drives right now):

• For Windows, I have a 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD.
• For Proxmox, I have a 256GB SSD and 3TB HDD.

Using the BIOS ability to hide certain internal (SATA) drives, I can basically hide the drives not being used.  So when I want to use Proxmox, I hide the two drives tied to Windows.  While I can't easily swap between the two systems (like you can a dual boot setup) it helps ensure I don't mess up one environment while using the other.

I am not going to go into details on how I setup Proxmox since there are plenty of guides out there, but I will share a few high level points that I felt would be useful:

• It is very easy to install Proxmox, but make sure you still read over the documentation.  On the install page instructions, it links to ( https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html ) which has good info.
• Configure your updates: If you are using the free setup, you should go into updates > repositories to disable the two enterprise options and enable the "no-subscription" option.
• If you plan to setup a cluster, you should do that before adding VMs.  I don't remember the exact issue, but I know I ran into some situation where I couldn't setup a cluster because one of the hosts already had VMs on it.
• Keep notes on configuration in case you need to set things up again.
• Check out https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ which has scripts to make it really easy to setup different capabilities (mainly containers).