New to Proxmox

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rkrick99

New Member
Jul 1, 2026
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Sorry in advance if this is not the right place to post:

I am new to Proxmox and would like to setup a home lab to learn. I was able to get a few old RSA servers from my job they were getting rid of. I did have a basic version of VMware running on one and did deploy a few windows 10 machines. My learning copy of of VMware stopped functioning and thought that Proxmox could be a good replacement. I have a total of 5 servers and a 12 drive bay enclosure. I am looking to start out with 2 of the dell R640's and if the electric bill does not kill me, I my add the others down the road. I have included the basic server specs below and would like some help designing and setting up a good home lab. I do plan on updating networking to 10 gig at some point once it becomes affordable.
Server 1
Dell R640
2 intel Xeon Gold 6134
128 GB DDR4
2 1117.25GB SAS


Server 3
Dell R640
2 intel Xeon Gold 6126
256 gb DDR4 memory
2 1117.25GB SAS
4 2235GB SAS
Drive bay encloure attached
12 7489.5gb drives
 
Hi @rkrick99 , welcome to the forum.
Congratulations on embarking on a new technology journey. Your post is mostly hardware oriented but does not contain an explicit question.
The hardware is certainly more than sufficient for a home experiment. I would recommend starting with simple single node install and grow from there.

Cheers

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox
 
It's hard to decipher what drives you have there. Can you somewhat normalize the specs? Such as 1TB SAS SSD or 2TB 10k SAS HDD, etc. Maybe pull them out to have a look at the label?

Can you list out the other equipment as well? The drive bay should be able to be connected to any server by moving the SAS controller. Is the enclosure also Dell, such as a PowerVault expansion shelf?

For tinkering with HA, hyperconverged/Ceph, you'll really need three systems to be up at once, and SSDs will be pretty much required.

For home use, the 1U form factor of the R640 and similar is slightly less than ideal, due to limited drive bays and higher fan speed noise, although you can possibly get them pretty quiet by going through the BIOS and iDRAC settings and setting it so the OS can control the power throttling. Also, depending on what PCIe cards you have in the slots, it simply may not allow the fans to reach a very low RPM due to air needing to flow past the cards for cooling. An example might be that if they have 10G PCIe cards installed but you have no 10G switches or cabling, you could remove those.

For power, you might be able to reach below 100W idle, but any VM CPU activity will cause that to jump up. With 3-4 systems pulling 300-400W continuous total and depending on where you live you might be be looking at an extra $500-$1k per year in electricity.

Regardless, you've got some nice gear to play with.
 
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