Many people use them as a low-stakes practice environment before using the same tools in a real-world business context. Homelab servers are no different from any other servers, except that you build them at home rather than in an office or data center. Homelab is just a colloquial term that’s grown in popularity in the last few years. The VM host runs a minimal set of software, so crashes and mandatory reboots are rare. That was fine for a while, but reboots became a huge hassle.īetween forced reboots from Windows Update, voluntary restarts to complete software installs, and the occasional OS crash, I had to restart my entire suite of development VMs three to five times per month.Ī dedicated VM server spares me most reboots. Originally, I used VirtualBox to run VMs from my Windows desktop. If you’re not interested in the “why” of this project, you can jump directly to the build.

I decided to build a brand new homelab VM server for 2020.Ĭomponents of my new VM server build (most of them, anyway) I don’t care about the backstory show me your build! 🔗︎ My projects have become more resource-hungry, and mistakes I’d made in my first build were coming back to bite me.

In the past few months, I began hitting the limits of my VM server. It’s been a fantastic investment, as it sped up numerous dev tasks and improved reliability. Three years ago, I took things to the next level by building my own homelab server to host all of my VMs. Each of my projects gets a dedicated VM, sparing me the headache of dependency conflicts and TCP port collisions. For the past five years, I’ve done all of my software development in virtual machines (VMs).

Reddit winodws server vdi