Motivation #
Years ago I ran VMWare vSphere on as a VM my desktop gaming PC. It worked but it used a lot of resources and became tedious to switch whenever I wanted to do something else or startup a game. In the past few years I had embraced the cloud as I started to use it for work diving deep into AWS in my day job. In the past few years WSL and Docker Desktop saw more maturity so on Windows I no longer saw the need to run a seperate linux VM
using and it really was
I know in this day besides cloud services there are many VPS options that are excellent. Digital Ocean, Amazon LightSail
I’ve been looking for a place to try things myself and not have to worry about bills from forgetting to turn off a cloud instance or having to create and destroy the resources using IaC.
Hardware #
I was inspired by Serve The Home https://www.servethehome.com/
Lenovo THINKCENTRE M900
Intel Core i5-6500T
8GB RAM
128GB SATA SSD --> upgraded to 512GB M.2 SSD
I purchased it from a local refurbisher for $230 CAD during the Raspberry Pi shortage of 2022. Now as of Jan. 2024 you can get the same for $160 CAD or less
If you are planning to purchase one today I would spend the extra and get one with an Intel 8th Gen CPU as these are being phased out of enterprises and into refurbishers and offer more cores. For example the Core i5-8500T has 6 cores as opposed to the 4 cores of the i5-6500T
These ones will also be compatible with Windows 11 so they will continue to be supported after Microsoft’s planned end of security updates of Windows 10 in 2025,
also have Windows license