I suggest a Hypervisor on the hardware always. Promox, ESXi or Xen. Then run your large OS’s as VM’s on top, you won’t regret it.

I suggest a Hypervisor on the hardware always. Promox, ESXi or Xen. Then run your large OS’s as VM’s on top, you won’t regret it.

I am about 25 years into the journey of doing IT more than just using a computer as a computer.

Early memories are having the side of my PC case open with IDE hard drives sticking out the side so that I had more storage.

Yes, it’s free. ESXi is part of the vSphere stack.

Get installing and get self hosting :)

ESXi is my go to hypervisor but I think proxmox is more popular here & /r/homelab.

Either way, yes 100% you should put a hypervisor on it.

If you are not going to do hardware RAID on the server then one small SSD for the OS I suggest then another high quality SSD (2.5 or Nvme via a PCIE adapter) for VM storage primary storage then a HDD if you want storage on the server also.

I often have a VM with 2 virtual disks assgined, one on the SSD and one on the HDD.

Why did you remove the text of the post hah?

Welcome to the club !!

No your not tripping. These are solid VM machines with loads of options on how you populate them with storage.

Oh my this was their active sever in 2023 ? What OS was it running ? I played with these or Compaq G3 long long ago.