Hello.
I recently bought a minisforum Hx90 with the Ryzen 5900hx and 64gb ddr4.
I am hoping to make it a homelab for playing around with windows server/ clients regards to learning how admin tools work, as well as a game server or two, a few home network services and a file server running on it.
I have a 2tb high endurance MSI m.2 has the primary drive and a 3.84 tb samsung pm863a as secondary drive. There is room for an additional sata drive if needed.
I have seen the widespread coverage of proxmox as a good vm os, as well as XCP-NG.
However, it seems other solutions like Unraid, Windows Hyper-v server 2019, Harvester, Smart-os, Xenserver, Xen, Overt and Danube Cloud exist?
In your opinions, which is the easiest to use and which of these solution that also allows the IGPU/ or a dGPU to be passed thought to a vm? I have a bootleg copy of ESXI somewhere I could try loading up but beyond that I really don’t want to pay much for licensing if it can be avoided.
Additionally, I currently have a Asustor Nas but am looking to possibly set up a server with a large bank of HDDs in the future, and possible a Dgpu. I have heard freenas and a few other Nas OS’s also allow VM’s. Would it be better to host VMs on there?
I think unRAID might be the easiest, though I’ve no direct experience of it. I’ve been thinking of trying a dedicated VM os myself and initially thought of Promox. Lawrence Systems (Tom) recommends XCP-NG which has better management and expansion facilities I believe, however I bow out to those that are more in the know!
I recommend installing Proxmox and making a VM for each OS listed above. Then check what you like the most. That’s how I did it. Most of them are free, so just get the image and pump it into the VM to boot.
I went with plain old Xen (w/ Debian dom0), I’d cross it off your list.
It’s cool and interesting. But it’s not going to land in the top 10 easiest to use options. It’s more of a primitive that you could use to build your own solution with various other technologies, rather than a solution in itself.
XCP-ng wraps up Xen into what looks like an approachable solution.
As previously stated by the people xcp-ng or proxmox, have been rocking xcp-ng for both work and home lab for the past years, very happy with it but i think proxmox might have a better approach of pci passthrough from what I have seen (not tested)
Proxmox is pretty easy to configure and use. It makes creating templates and cloning from those templates easy. xcp-ng is probably just as easy to use but the web front-end (GUI) is set up in a discrete VM whereas in Proxmox the hypervisor and GUI are integrated. I have barely begun to learn xcp-ng.
