From building a NAS to creating a self-hosted web server, there’s a lot you can do with a PC once it starts to show its age. But if you're a fan of trying out different projects, you can even convert an obsolete rig into a home lab that's capable of running different virtual machines and containers for all your computing needs.

After hearing good things about Proxmox, I decided to build a home lab with it to stop my secondary PC from gathering dust, and here’s everything I learned from the experiment.

Why I installed Proxmox instead of using a simple hypervisor

General-purpose Type-2 hypervisors like VirtualBox are good enough to run a VM or two for lightweight tasks. However, since I’m planning to run NextCloud, a web server, and a host of other projects, there's no doubt that my Ryzen 5 1600-powered rig will buckle under pressure and turn into a stuttering mess should I try to run more than a few GUI operating systems on VirtualBox.

That’s where Proxmox came in handy: by running my virtual machines directly on the underlying hardware, I can cut down on the performance overhead. Heck, I don’t even need to create full-fledged virtual machines: since Proxmox supports lightweight Linux Containers, I could lower the resource consumption and increase the system’s efficiency when running multiple projects at the same time.

Creating the Proxmox server was simple...

If anything, the process is second nature for distro hoppers

Just like installing a new operating system, the first step in turning my faithful Ryzen 5 1600-powered dinosaur into a Proxmox server involved creating a bootable USB drive. As always, I used Rufus for this process, and within a few minutes, the flashing tool had finished writing the OS files on my flash drive.

Next, I had to modify the BIOS of my MSI B450 Gaming Plus Max motherboard to force the PC to boot from the newly configured USB drive. This was the simplest step in the entire procedure, as all I had to do was mash the Delete key as the BIOS booted up and change the boot priority of my PC from Crucial P3 500GB SSD to the 32GB USB drive containing the Proxmox installation files.

With that, I rebooted the system and used the Graphical installer to set up Proxmox on my SSD. While the installation was relatively quick, entering the web UI was far from simple, and I had to spend the next hour troubleshooting my setup.

... Accessing the web UI, was not

Keeping the Wi-Fi adapter plugged into my PC was a mistake

Some background info: Since the B450 motherboard I’d used lacked a built-in Wi-Fi module, I had to buy an external adapter from TP-Link for the times when I couldn’t use Ethernet.

Turns out, the adapter was conflicting with the LAN interface, which is why I kept running into the “This network can’t be reached” error message when I tried to open the web UI on Chrome. I finally realized what went wrong after checking the network devices with the ip -a command and failing to ping the Google.com and 1.1.1.1 servers. Luckily, unplugging the Wi-Fi adapter did the trick, and I was able to arrive at the login page of the web UI after my third attempt at installing Proxmox.

The Web UI is robust and laden with features

Better yet, it's nowhere near as complex as the TrueNAS interface

After typing root as the username and entering the same password I chose for the Proxmox server during its installation, the Proxmox web UI finally booted up. Before dabbling with LXC and KVM containers, I wanted to install a virtual machine for Q4OS on the Proxmox server. There were a handful of ways for me to get the ISO image, but I wanted to download it directly on my old PC instead of transferring it from my daily driver.

So, I went to the Storage Pools tab and used the Download from URL option to grab a Q4OS ISO. Creating the VM was a cinch, and within a few minutes, my lightweight Q4OS virtual machine was up and running. I repeated the procedure with Puppy Linux and Endeavour OS, and soon, I had three GUI-based operating systems running on my aged Ryzen 5 1600 processor.

To wrap things up, I decided to create a NextCloud container. To further simplify things, I decided to use the turnkey NextCloud container template. Since it wasn’t available by default, I headed to the Shell tab and used the pveam update command to add it to my Proxmox server. Once I’d downloaded the template, I created a container for the NextCloud server, and the process was so quick that going through the NextCloud initialization tool took longer than creating multiple VMs and a container!

I heartily recommend turning an old PC into a Proxmox server

Initially, I had doubts about the performance of the home server, especially after my Ryzen 5 1600's disappointing performance in newer games and virtualization tasks. However, it was surprising to see the seven-year-old budget processor perform so well in a home lab.

When I create a project on my PCs, laptops, microcontrollers, and SBCs, I continue to use them for a few weeks before wiping the storage to make space for new projects. But I was so impressed by my makeshift home lab that I might just buy a new SSD to keep Proxmox permanently installed on my PC!