How I went from a cluster of old laptops to a sleek, efficient Proxmox server that runs everything I need

Let me tell you about my journey with my home server setup — it’s been quite the ride from scrapping together old laptops to running a solid, power-friendly system on a single machine. It all started when I was 16, roughing out a janky homelab using three broken laptops screwed to my wall. Each was running Debian 12 with Pi-hole and Nextcloud, which was functional but honestly wasn’t the cleanest or most efficient setup.

The real game changer came when someone suggested I try Proxmox. At first, I clustered those laptops, then kept adding more until I had seven nodes. It looked really cool having eight nodes on Proxmox — seven laptops plus my gaming PC. But reality hit hard when I measured power consumption with a smart plug wattmeter. Those laptops were sucking power nonstop while the real workload had shifted to my gaming rig.

So, I decided to pull the plug—literally. Now, I run everything on a single Proxmox node: my gaming PC. It’s an i5-12400F with 48GB RAM and an RTX 3060 12GB GPU. This change made my home server setup rock solid and way more power-efficient. When the AI stuff isn’t running, the system idles around 50 watts, which even my parents appreciate since they use some of the services I set up like Immich and an email archive.

Right now, my home server setup runs 31 containers and three VMs. Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve got going:

• Pi-hole for network-level ad blocking
• Multiple Minecraft servers for friends and family
• Plex to stream media
• Various websites I maintain
• DDClient plus VPN for dynamic DNS and secure connections
• Immich for photo backup, which is the clear MVP of the lab
• Spotify statistics tracking
• Email archivers
• A file converter server (ConvertX has been a lifesaver)
• Gitea for hosting Git repositories
• A private internet radio setup for my grandma with all her old cassette and CD songs digitized
• OctoPrint controlling my 3D printer
• Home Assistant managing smart home devices
• A Network Attached Storage (NAS) running ZFS with redundant drives for reliable storage
• A VM I call AICENTER running Pop!_OS for all my local AI needs: image generation, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, background removal, and even a private Alexa linked to my documents and smart home

Centralizing all these on one solid machine has been surprisingly great. It’s simpler to manage and keeps things more efficient.

Recently, a friend gifted me a Fujitsu Primergy TX2540 M1 server — a proper, heavy-duty server with dual Xeon E5-2420 v2 CPUs and 96GB RAM. It even has 3D-printed drive bays because the originals were stolen at work. But this beast drinks power like crazy. Running it triples my energy consumption compared to the gaming PC, so running a cluster is off the table for now. The biggest benefit is the RAM, since my gaming PC is usually near 95% memory usage. My plan is to save up and upgrade the RAM on my PC to 128GB someday, so I can run all my services simultaneously without juggling.

If you’re obsessing over home server setups, I’d recommend starting simple and thinking about power consumption early on. Clustering laptops might look cool but can be a costly mistake when it comes to your electric bill.

If you want to dive deeper into Proxmox and home virtualization, check out the official Proxmox documentation here. For power monitoring devices, the TP-Link Tapo series is worth a look TP-Link Tapo Smart Plug. And for learning more about ZFS for storage reliability, the OpenZFS project is a solid resource OpenZFS.

Thanks for reading about my home server setup journey. It’s fun to look back and see how much I’ve learned and grown, and I’m excited for the next upgrade step. If you’re thinking about your own homelab, just take it one step at a time and keep an eye on what really matters—like power use, hardware capability, and what you actually need running.

Happy homelabbing!