As an IT professional, having a homelab server is a great way to stay current, and have the ability to spin up test environments on a whim to try out new software or operating systems.

I’ve used several systems over the years for homelab servers, primarily with VMware ESXi, but it was time to get a new system, as my old homelab server has seen its day. I decided to go with the Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 2 with Ryzen 5 Pro 4650GE, 8GB RAM, 256GB NVMe storage. I immediately increased the RAM to 24GB, and the storage to 1TB.

This system packs a lot of punch, isn’t noisy, and takes very little power. The system has a 6 core, 12 thread Ryzen Pro CPU, and support up to 64 GB of RAM. This gives me the ability to run multiple virtual machines with ease.

I decided to move away from VMware ESXi, as they have removed support for Realtek, and I didn’t feel like doing the workaround to get the network card working. Besides, I needed this system as a new desktop, so I decided to use it with a type 2 hypervisor for the meantime.

Since setting up the new system, I’ve spun up 4 VM’s running Nextcloud, Kali Linux, a private cloud PC running Windows 10 Professional, and Windows Server 2019, configured as a domain controller, which will be used as part as my penetration testing environment.

I’m currently running Ubuntu 20.04, with QEMU as a type 2 hypervisor. Management of the VM’s are being done by Virt-Manager, and Cockpit. I plan to pick up a second system when they go on sale again, and will change to a type 1 hypervisor using Proxmox VE.

So far the system has been great, and performs awesome.