How to Homelab - Laptops as Servers?! 

I bought ASRock A300 system for AMD Ryzen CPUs and installed Proxmox there. It has enough power for labs and experiments. You tutorials are of a great help. Thanks a lot for your work!

Oh my goodness gracious! Thank you very much! This video is a TREMENDOUS help with my attempts to get familiar with the ins and outs of a career pivot. Take care

This is cool...i am in the middle of creating my first laptop server. Thanks Jay!

Thank you for this content... well outlined and ready to follow

I was legit going to do this on my Thinkpad business laptop, great minds think alike

If you ever offer online classes, I'd be interested in paying tuition to learn some material / ask questions ,etc.

Gr8 video!! Can you do a video on how High Availability and automatic failover needs to be configured proxmox cluster for VMs

Nice I've been looking for something to do with my old laptop and NUC

Are you logging in to the GUI, on the same laptop as the PVE? - if so how do you get the web browser up from the PVE?

It's so funny, I just build a server out of my laptop 1 day before pre-view of this video appeared on Patreon :) I've used my old Lenovo T460p for those purposes.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge

Perfect timing. Can you model Virtual LAMP or PERN stack pieces?

Hi Jay, I'm planning to build a ryzen home server so I can load something like proxmox on. Any motherboard recommendations?

a friend of mine gave me a HP ML370 G6 tower server and I'm planning to make it a homelab but I don't know how or where to start, can you give me some advices? thank you

Before I actually followed your Ubuntu server tutorials, I was looking to buy an old second hand tower to work as a server. My cousin (who works in IT contract work for Canadian military) told me 'nah dumbass, just use an old laptop' (not exact words but the spirit of his suggestion). So I installed Ubuntu server on an old Asus XJ15 laptop. Its battery has conked out, it has a spinning hard disk, only 8GB of RAM, and running a i5 5th gen. It works like a charm for my nextcloud and plex server instances. The only issue is that the server dies every time I have a power cut, and it can't handle 1080p video without seriously overheating, but for music and simple nextcloud instance, you can't beat it.

Great tutorial, as always !! I'm using two old laptops as servers. Be aware of the accu !!!! Of you keep them 24/7 connected the accu WILL die. So i use a timed powerplug to switch of the power a few hours at night. So the accu stays healty and does the job when it needs to, in case of a powerdown.

Im gonna finish my main proxmox at some point until I do I’m actually using an old laptop without a screen for proxmox it doesn’t have great cpu performance but it has 2X500gb hdd and a 120gb ssd for proxmox/ISO’s and 12 gb ram

Great video!

How do virtual machine server assigned a public ip

I have an old dell 610 that I got running zorin os ... It runs pretty smooth but maybe this would be a nice project for it ...

I installed Ubuntu server 20.04 on a Dell Latitude E5520 laptop. The install went fine but I can't get the display to blank after time or when the lid is closed. As a server, I do not want the display active continuously. Mostly I will be using ssh to manage the server. Any suggestions?

Awesome content

My only concern about this, is the heat produced by the laptops under high demand. Even one single task runing in the servers could rise the temps significally. it's an affordable option now that the 4 or 5 years old premium laptops are a bang for the buck. But i'd prefer a tiny pc for about the same price. Better cooling solution, more ram and storage.

I have a kind of cluster between my laptop and my desktop. I use Virtualbox and Ubuntu as Host. Both hosts run from ZFS and I use the "send | ssh receive" to move my VMs from desktop to laptop once a week. I moved all my "work" to VMs. I have exactly the same environment (VMs) at home (desktop) and on the road (laptop). The VMs are: - a Xubuntu VM for communication, so Transmission, Email, WhatsApp, KDE-Connect etc, the only VM with open ports and the only one always loaded; - an Ubuntu VM for experiments and trying new Apps; - an encrypted Ubuntu Mate VM for banking and PayPal; - an Ubuntu Studio VM for multimedia; - a Manjaro VM for browsing the internet, a clone that can be destroyed and re-cloned at any moment; - a Windows 10 Pro VM. Note that I have extensive ZFS snapshots on the desktop up to one year, while on the laptop I maintain only one month of snapshots, caused by the difference in storage sizes. Desktop 512 GB nvme SSD and 1536 GB of HDDs and laptop 1 TB SSHD. My laptop is a Sandy Bridge i5; a HP Elitebook 8460p with 8GB, my desktop is a Ryzen 3 2200G with 16GB. On my desktop I can run 2 Windows VMs or 4 Linux VMs at the same time. I have only two hands to feed the beast, so 2 or 4 that is enough.

Looking to buy a laptop that was used as a server. Is this hard on a laptop

wait, with this set up the data isn't replicated between the two?

please do a video series on ZFS freenas or truenas

i brought some damaged/broken t430's i plan on making a plex media/Minecraft server out of one planed specs: i7 2nd gen (4 cores) 16 gb ram i was thinking to run it out side of the laptop case as i was thinking about putting a bigger cooler on it so it could be passively cooled and i plan on splitting the sata port so i can have more hdds am gonna 3d print a 4 x 2.5 inch hdd holder and having an msata for a boot drive although before i plan on keeping in the laptop case so i can set it up and find out what os i should use and how to use it this is learning experience as i have little experience with servers i have ran a linux mind and windows 10 plex server and i tried too run plex on truenas but failed, need to learn more about dhcp and static ip's as for the Minecraft server i have ran a server on my main rig (windows 10)and it worked fine any advise would be helpful (btw am 16, no job. i brought these laptops for my birthday as just love fixing computers)

Thanks for more awesome content, Jay! I have a question/request. Currently I have a half-dead lenovo g505s with almost non functioning screen. I tried to hook it up to a monitor and use as a linux box, but can't enter the bios setup because of dead screen. Do you know a surefire way to force a laptop to output video to vga first instead of built-in monitor? And could you perhaps make a vid about turning a no good for traditional use machine into a server?

Quick question do the laptops have to be open or on all the time if am been ssh In to them !?

thanks

can i run promox on orangepi

I gave my Dell 6420 a file server job as it won't die. Just to have some files centralized is worth it.

can i use old xp computers i have alotb of them

Is proxmox something similar to VMware ESXI host?

I was just trying to do this. Then found out my one laptop doesn't support Virtualization lol. Any recomendations for its use? Standalone Debian server running something?? 2 Cores, 4GB Ram

And I was wondering about that...

so can all of these old pc can run just One OS ?

I have found an 6 year old gaming laptop in a dumpster with an Core i5-4310m and 8GB RAM, never thought to use it as an hypervisor The battery is dead and the Radeon GPU might be too but everything else is still working fine

Would it be worth clustering more than two laptops?

Needed subtitles sir

I made my first homelab on a machine with Ryzen 7 2700X , and 32Gb ram

i have put linux on them upgrade the ram so they very modern i know that bkuz im able to use them online

I know its apples and oranges, but proxmox VS docker?

Good idea, bun not working for me. I have setup zabbix on old netbook with atom cpu, and he got always stuck after 2days.

Thinkpad laptop is terrible because it swaps the Cntrl and Fn buttons on the keyboard as shown in 2:43 .

How to homelab? That headline indicates it is for beginners! I am a beginner and you kind of lost me here in this video. Don't get me wrong it seemed quite forward and easy. Your guide was very understandable. But I was waiting for the gold! And risking to become ridiculed because of my ignorance, I have to ask: Why? Why would I install proxmox and install debian on it. What is the usecase? How will it benefit me doing this?

But you never explained what can you do with a home lab? What is it used for? What can you do with a home lab that you can't do with a single pc?

im sure this is a great video, but im less then 2 minutes in and i feel this is not the vid im looking for.. (to advanced for me, wtf is proxmox??)

Proxmox 70$$$ buy year or buy new laptop ???

You know what, smartphones have the same described advantages as laptops. So, why not repurpose old smartphones in home network as some kind of small computing devices, instead of creating more e-waste? I've been carrying this idea for a long time.

Yes but they better have quad core CPUs otherwise it slows down quickly.