The ability to mix and match different hardware components is a neat aspect of home labs, but the real fun begins once you start tinkering with all the operating systems, container runtimes, and virtualization platforms at your disposal. These days, Proxmox stands at the apex of the home lab ecosystem, with XCP-ng, Harvester, and ESXi following closely behind it.

Aside from the key players, you’ve also got a bunch of obscure distros and enterprise-grade application stacks that offer their own niche advantages for your home servers. And then there’s the Windows side of the equation. If you’re a veteran home labber, you may have used Hyper-V Server 2019, which is the last free version of Microsoft’s Type-1 hypervisor. But what about Windows Server – the OS that brings a bunch of other cool-sounding services alongside Hyper-V?

While it’s possible to use it as the base of your tinkering lab, I wouldn’t advise doing that if you’re looking for something you can run long-term. Not because Windows Server 2025 is bad (it’s quite the opposite, actually), but due to the licensing fees associated with using this platform.

Windows Server’s pricing is absolutely bonkers

Especially in the world of FOSS platforms

With the majority of popular home server utilities having FOSS roots, you won’t find expensive software in typical tinkering labs. Sure, many distros, tools, and platforms tend to have paid licenses, but they tend to include complicated enterprise-oriented features that you probably won’t ever need in a consumer-grade setup. Proxmox, Portainer, and TrueNAS are prime examples of this type of license, and you’ve also got other tools, like OpenMediaVault, that let you access everything without paying a dime.

But in cases like ESXi, you might find the parent company locking certain services behind a paywall. Meanwhile, Unraid requires you to pay for a premium license once your trial period expires. Unfortunately, Windows Server manages to combine the worst aspects of ESXi and Unraid. Like the latter, you can tinker with the distro for some time before needing to buy a license, except the fees lie in the same range as ESXi’s (or rather, vSphere’s) paid plans.

And you can only access the free version for 180 days

Sure, you can drop a grand on a home lab platform if that’s what you desire. But considering the sheer number of FOSS Linux distributions out there, I can’t recommend dropping that much money on a mere OS, especially when you could use that to grab some high-quality hardware. In Windows Server’s defense, you get a lot longer to mess around with the platform before being forced to shell out money for the premium license, and the 180-day time limit is more generous than the one on Unraid.

If you’re a daredevil or an ace DIY enthusiast, you could avoid paying exorbitant license fees on a server by installing a new instance of Windows Server every six months. But I’d never use Windows Server 2025 as my primary OS for a long-term home lab, as I wouldn’t want to rebuild my workstations from scratch when the timer inevitably drops to zero. That’s a real shame, because the more I use Windows Server 2025, the more it grows on me.

Otherwise, it’s surprisingly decent for home labbers

AD and Hyper-V are really fun to tinker with

As someone who has dealt with Hyper-V in the past, I figured Windows Server 2025 would just add a bunch of industry-grade companion services that I wouldn’t really use. But as it turns out, plenty of these tools have their use cases even in a home lab environment. The Server Manager, for example, is the equivalent of the dashboard you’ll find on most server platforms, and includes everything from config settings, resource utilization metrics, and cluster management tools.

I enabled a bunch of different roles on my Windows Server 2025 instance, and Active Directory is easily my favorite part of this platform. It makes credential management and permission assignment a lot simpler, and is perfect for my descent into Windows-based DevOps projects. Good ol’ PowerShell is here as well, and the OS also includes a lightweight CLI version, so I can use it with low-power devices (including systems that can’t meet the minimum requirements for Windows 11). Then there’s Hyper-V in all its virtualization glory. It’s a lot easier to use than typical hypervisors, and it can even power Windows containers.

Me? I plan to use it for my DevOps projects... in a nested VM setup

I’ve been playing around with a bare-metal Windows Server 2025 instance for the last couple of days. But as I’ve said before, I won’t rely on it as my primary home lab platform – that honor belongs to the likes of Proxmox, Harvester, and other free tools. Instead, I plan to use it to train my DevOps and sysadmin skills. When I’m done getting the hang of Windows Server, I’ll probably move to a CLI version of the platform – one that runs on my Xeon PVE node in a nested environment.