Homelab - XCP-ng

As I mentioned in an earlier 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 XCP-ng on my machine, while keeping the Windows OS and Proxmox available.  My earlier post has details on my Proxmox setup.

Here is my approach (my HP Envy has 5 internal drives right now):

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

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 XCP-ng, I hide the other drives.  While I can't easily swap between the systems (like you can a dual boot setup) it helps ensure I don't mess up one environment while using the another.

I actually tried XCP-ng first (before I decided to start making blog posts about the homelab stuff), then tried Proxmox.  While I am starting to like Proxmox, I decided to give XCP-ng another try.

Out of the box, Proxmox was easier.  You just install and can hit the server directly via a web link.  With TCP-ng you have to install a virtual machine that will act as configuration interface.  I do like that you can find a Windows client for XCP-ng, which I don't think exists for Proxmox.

Once I setup XCP-ng, I setup a VM for an Ubuntu workstation which was pretty easy to do.  After that, I made sure the host itself wasn't using the GPU card and then configured the Ubuntu host to use the GPU card.  I also configured USB passthrough for the keyboard and mouse ( https://docs.xcp-ng.org/compute/#passing-through-keyboards-and-mice has useful info ).

So think of it this way:

• I power up my computer.
• XCP-ng loads
• Ubuntu VM auto-starts
• Ubuntu loads up on the local computer

So basically I would be Ubuntu as a desktop OS, but it is running on XCP-ng which could also have other virtual systems running on it.  Unfortunately I couldn't get Ubuntu working on this setup, and I gave up on trying.  For now I am going to focus on Proxmox.