Every year end I spend some time during the holidays cleaning up technical debt. Updating this, rebuilding that, re-configuring other stuff.
This year I rebuilt a home server PC that had failed sometime in November. I wanted onboard graphics, so I selected an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G on an MSI B550M Pro VDH WiFi motherboard, with 16GB of Corsair Vengance LPX DDR4 RAM, and a Crucial P3+ 500GB M.2 SSD. This is my first M.2 drive, and I am quite pleased with this format, much nicer than cables and platters for sure.
A smart friend suggested that I run a hypervisor on this hardware, which I thought was brilliant. After a quick bit of research I chose Proxmox, which was easy to install and has been simple to use and manage. I did have to enable SVM and IOMMU in the BIOS to build any VMs, but it was trivial.
The primary use for this server before it failed was a camera server for the PoE IP cameras that came with the house, so one of the first things I tried was a Zoneminder LXC container from a template. Overall the build went smoothly. After I figured out that I had to dial down the cameras frame rate the application was much more responsive, and now I am just fiddling with camera zones.
The next thing I tried was a Pi-Hole server. I have Eeros, and their “Secure+” offering is okay, but they are raising prices, etc. and I really wanted more control. I first tried it with a vanilla container, but I wanted to use the web interface too and that would not work on an unprivileged instance, so I built a Debian 11 VM instead. Pi-Hole installed easily, and everything is using it after I changed the DNS server setting in the Eero configuration.
I have not yet decided what next to build on the home hypervisor, but there is lots of capacity left for whatever I think of.