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[cmo30]

Hi guys I'm looking into doing a homelab for learning type 1 virtualization the problem is I only have one PC containing a 5600x with 32GB of ram and a 1TB team group NVME SSD and a Intel ARC A770 GPU what would be your recommendation and advise I could use a type 2 hypervisor and run it on my windows host using nested virtualization but I'm afraid my hardware won't suffice any advise would be much appreciated thanks in advance.

[Needfuldoer]

What's your budget?

 

How much room do you have?

 

An older workstation like an HP Z440 makes a great homelab platform if you've got the space for it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

You can also run Hyper-v on the system, which is a type 1 hypervisor. Should me more than enough for some learning.

 

The type 1 vs type 2 hypervisor doesn't really matter there days. Is there something specific to a type 1 feature you want?

[cmo30]

13 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

What's your budget?

 

How much room do you have?

 

An older workstation like an HP Z440 makes a great homelab platform if you've got the space for it.

Thats a really good option for a homelab server my problem is I don't have the cash flow right now were im currently not working at the moment 

[cmo30]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can also run Hyper-v on the system, which is a type 1 hypervisor. Should me more than enough for some learning.

 

The type 1 vs type 2 hypervisor doesn't really matter there days. Is there something specific to a type 1 feature you want?

I really am wanting to learn proxmox were it's a type 1 hypervisor and were it would be a good skill to have underneath my belt for when I get into IT for a career 

[LIGISTX]

19 minutes ago, cmo30 said:

Hi guys I'm looking into doing a homelab for learning type 1 virtualization the problem is I only have one PC containing a 5600x with 32GB of ram and a 1TB team group NVME SSD and a Intel ARC A770 GPU what would be your recommendation and advise I could use a type 2 hypervisor and run it on my windows host using nested virtualization but I'm afraid my hardware won't suffice any advise would be much appreciated thanks in advance.

That PC is plenty enough for a homelab + your daily machine. 
 

Ny old homelab used to run on an i3 6100 and the CPU performance was never the issue, I just needed more RAM and PCIe. 
 

That i3 ran ESXi with the following VM’s:

truenas

windows LTSC

home assistant

3x Ubuntu server, one of which was a Plex server, one of which held half a dozen docker containers

Some other random light weight VM’s

 

Your PC is plenty enough to start learning with. 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, cmo30 said:

I really am wanting to learn proxmox were it's a type 1 hypervisor and were it would be a good skill to have underneath my belt for when I get into IT for a career 

You can probably setup Hyper-v nested virt here, and then run Proxmox inside that. 

 

Otherwise I'd just use Hyper-v the featres between the hypervisors are pretty simmilar.

[LIGISTX]

2 minutes ago, cmo30 said:

I really am wanting to learn proxmox were it's a type 1 hypervisor and were it would be a good skill to have underneath my belt for when I get into IT for a career 

The hypervisor you learn on almost doesn’t matter. Learning and understand how to architect virtual networking, storage, etc is what matters. The host OS can be somewhat easily changed and your knowledge will transfer. Sure, some of the details that are specific to hyper-V or proxmox are different, but if you understand what you are fundamentally doing, that’s a quick google search away. I learned homelab virtualization on ESXi, and when I switched to proxmox the learning curve was practically non-existent compared to learning ESXi originally. 
 

It’s like learning how to ride a bike, then switching to a motorcycle. The general idea is all the same, same balance is required (mostly) but the way in which you execute is a little different.

[cmo30]

3 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

That PC is plenty enough for a homelab + your daily machine. 
 

Ny old homelab used to run on an i3 6100 and the CPU performance was never the issue, I just needed more RAM and PCIe. 
 

That i3 ran ESXi with the following VM’s:

truenas

windows LTSC

home assistant

3x Ubuntu server, one of which was a Plex server, one of which held half a dozen docker containers

Some other random light weight VM’s

 

Your PC is plenty enough to start learning with. 

 

That's great to hear would you recommend I use VMware workstation and run proxmox in a VM using nested virtualization or install proxmox directly on my PC hardware also if I use nested virtualization how much ram would I need to allocate and storage.

[LIGISTX]

6 minutes ago, cmo30 said:

That's great to hear would you recommend I use VMware workstation and run proxmox in a VM using nested virtualization or install proxmox directly on my PC hardware also if I use nested virtualization how much ram would I need to allocate and storage.

I’d probably just nest for now. And RAM will totally depend on the OS’s and applications you are trying to run. To start, 4GB will be plenty. 

[cmo30]

1 minute ago, LIGISTX said:

I’d probably just nest for now. And RAM will totally depend on the OS’s and applications you are trying to run. To start, 4GB will be plenty. 

So basically just give the proxmox VM 4GB when creating the VM for proxmox inside VMware workstation pro but 4GB of ram for the proxmox VM probably won't leave me enough ram for VMs inside of the proxmox VM or can I assign how much ram I want inside of the proxmox VM 

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, cmo30 said:

So basically just give the proxmox VM 4GB when creating the VM for proxmox inside VMware workstation pro but 4GB of ram for the proxmox VM probably won't leave me enough ram for VMs inside of the proxmox VM or can I assign how much ram I want inside of the proxmox VM 

Just try to see if you can get the Proxmox webui. Proxmox doesn't need much resources on its own, so just add the ram usage up of all your VMs and thats about how much the Proxmox vm needs.

 

I'd personally use hyper-v here if it was me. Should be included with windows.

[LIGISTX]

30 minutes ago, cmo30 said:

So basically just give the proxmox VM 4GB when creating the VM for proxmox inside VMware workstation pro but 4GB of ram for the proxmox VM probably won't leave me enough ram for VMs inside of the proxmox VM or can I assign how much ram I want inside of the proxmox VM 

You assign VM’s resources from the proxmox webUI. If you pass proxmox 4GB from VMware, you’d have about 3.8GB to distribute out to VM’s (I’d leave a few hundred MB unassigned, but VM’s also have RAM ballooning if enabled, which will shift RAM around if you run into resource constraints…) You have a lot of learning, and the best way is to just start. You will learn by doing it. 
 

What VM’s are you planning to run right away? You likely only need a few GB of RAM for them. I run Ubuntu server VM’s on 1GB of ram each, I have ran them on 700 GB each… your VM’s likely won’t need much.

[cmo30]

1 minute ago, LIGISTX said:

You assign VM’s resources from the proxmox webUI. If you pass proxmox 4GB from VMware, you’d have about 3.8GB to distribute out to VM’s (I’d leave a few hundred MB unassigned, but VM’s also have RAM ballooning if enabled, which will shift RAM around if you run into resource constraints…) You have a lot of learning, and the best way is to just start. You will learn by doing it. 
 

What VM’s are you planning to run right away? You likely only need a few GB of RAM for them. I run Ubuntu server VM’s on 1GB of ram each, I have ran them on 700 GB each… your VM’s likely won’t need much.

My plan is to run Windows server and Linux also Truenas scale at some point also so basically I should give proxmox 8GB of ram or 16GB of ram to have enough ram for the VMs inside of the proxmox VM 

[LIGISTX]

12 minutes ago, cmo30 said:

My plan is to run Windows server and Linux also Truenas scale at some point also so basically I should give proxmox 8GB of ram or 16GB of ram to have enough ram for the VMs inside of the proxmox VM 

I probably wouldn’t multi nest truenas. You can… as long as you get the harddrive passthrough correct, but you really need to pass drives fully to truenas so ZFS can have block level access. 
 

You can always add more RAM via VMware later, and then subsequently add more RAM to the VM’s within proxmox. None of this is set in stone, all of these settings you can adjust on the fly. My best advice is give proxmox 4GB of RAM and probably 120GB of harddrive space which will be used for proxmox instal and to instal VM’s on, and just start playing around. 
 

To allow proxmox to use all the available space on its boot drive, do this: 

 

At 14:45, he shows how to dedicate all of your boot drive to be usable by VM’s. I have done this many times, works perfect.