Home Lab 1: Hardware

For the last couple of weeks, I have perused material concerning the SC-300 certification exam Microsoft offers. After configuring a greenfield setup in the cloud, I realized that I really wanted to test out some hybrid options. I would need a personal home lab of some sort.

I had three requirements/limitations: cheap, functional, small form factor.

After reviewing multiple scenarios from the Intel NUC to the Mac Mini M2, I decided to add cheap to my requirements and test my commitment. I considered Beelink and Minisforum, but settled on the Minisforum UM590 simply because it was an Amazon lightning deal for $500 with Windows 11 Pro, AMD Ryzen 5900HX, 32GB DDR4 ram, and 512GB NVME storage.

I was pretty sure the AMD Ryzen 5900HX could handle virtualization but knew that modifying the BIOS from YouTube reviews would be very limited. Most people buy this system as a lowend game system. I was a bit relieved after I finished the initial setup, looked at System Information, and Yes was next to all of the Hyper-V items.

I feel like this might be a good start to this personal project.

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