Over the course of my computing journey, I’ve built, upgraded, and replaced several PCs. But rather than labeling my older systems as e-waste and sending them to the scrapyard for pocket change, I try to come up with cool ways to leverage them in my home lab. For example, any mid-tier PC or laptop released in the last 5 years can be reborn as a solid general-purpose machine with a Linux distribution.
Older rigs with spare drive bays double as incredible Network-Attached Storage systems, and if they’re armed with a decent processor and memory, it can even run some VMs and containers. While we’re on the subject, outdated machines can become formidable self-hosting and experimentation machines with the right virtualization platform.
In fact, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks testing Proxmox on ancient hardware. Contrary to what you may believe, it works surprisingly well on cheap systems from the bygone era.
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Proxmox has fairly low system requirements
Unlike other virtualization platforms
Home labs are often characterized by overkill servers packing enterprise-grade hardware designed for an equally demanding operating system. Harvester is a prime example of that logic, with the platform requiring 16 CPU cores and 64GB of memory for a production-ready virtualization environment. Then you’ve got platforms like ESXi that refuse to play nice with consumer-grade hardware, and it’s a lesson I learned the hard way after attempting to install it on every system in my arsenal.
In contrast, Proxmox lists an x86 processor with 2GB of memory as the recommended system requirements, which are the same specs required by your average Linux distribution. That’s because Proxmox is essentially a set of virtualization packages running on top of good ol’ Debian, wrapped inside a convenient web UI. This makes Proxmox the ideal virtualization platform for turning old PCs into highly capable home servers.
It pairs well with weak devices
Including a mere N100 SBC and a decade-old budget laptop
Although I currently use a dual Xeon system as my primary Proxmox server, things were a lot different before I got my server machine. I used to run Proxmox on a mere Ryzen 5 1600 system with 16GB of RAM, and believe it or not, the platform worked really well on my outdated system.
And I don’t just mean a VM or two either – this beast of a virtualization platform was enough to run a couple of GUI virtual machines alongside a dozen LXCs without hitting max utilization on the CPU or memory. For a PC from 2016, being able to run that many VMs without buckling under the extra processing load is no short of a surprise – and I’ve got the KVM hypervisor to thank for that.
If that’s not enough, I recently conducted this wild experiment on running macOS on my N100 SBC. While the project wasn’t feasible enough for me to recommend anyone to try this at home, I figured I could try running a couple of virtual guests on the tiny tinkering board, and to my surprise, I was able to run two VMs and a couple of LXCs side-by-side without encountering performance issues.
To take this experiment to the next level, I tried turning the Lenovo G510 I bought back in 2014 into a PVE node. As you’d expect, the 2-core, 4-thread processor and a 4GB RAM stick buckled under pressure when I attempted to run a GUI distribution inside a virtual machine. However, Proxmox LXCs were a different story altogether…
An LXC-only Proxmox setup works better than you’d expect
Even without VMs, PVE nodes are great for self-hosting services
Virtual machines are undoubtedly an essential part of home servers, but so are containers. Since Proxmox supports Linux Containers out of the box, I don’t have to deploy a separate virtual machine just to install Docker, Podman, or another container runtime. Throw in TurnKey templates and Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts, and it’s possible to deploy a formidable army of containers without resorting to VMs at all.
That’s precisely what I did when my Lenovo G510 failed to run virtual machines. Luckily, the low overhead of LXCs is enough to circumvent the abysmally low processing capabilities of the laptop, and I was able to convert it into a reliable self-hosting machine that could run more than a dozen useful containers without conking out. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Proxmox is an underrated distribution for containerization projects, especially for low-end machines and dinosaur hardware.
Still, old PCs can have their own issues
Although I have no plans to stop my crusade on running Proxmox on anything I lay my eyes on, this article won’t be complete unless I mention the major drawbacks of using outdated PCs as home servers. Power efficiency on older hardware is far from ideal, and if your area has high energy prices, you’re better off spending some extra dollars on new rigs in the long run. Likewise, newer systems can deliver a more responsive experience than ancient machines, especially on the VM front.
But if you want to put e-waste devices to good use and have a renewable source of energy powering such an experiment, old systems can serve as decent Proxmox hubs. Me? I’ve already set my sights on a MacBook Pro from 2015 just so I could arm it with Proxmox and run a (comparatively) newer version of macOS on the laptop.
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