HAND - Article 2 - Prerequisites

Hello everyone, this is the second article of a series of articles describing and showing how to setup and deploy an amazing homelab, meant to satisfy all your needs and make you enjoy the process of creation.

To get started with the homelab project there are some features of your machine that need to be enabled and some firmware that needs to be updated, in the following article I will be breaking those down to specific steps that are necessary in order to turn your machine into a virtualization beast 🦁

1. Networking

Router with the possibility to manage the following settings
- The IP CIDR (Optional)
  - This setting is used if you want to change your IP CIDR from the classic 192.168.100.0/24 to something like 10.20.10.0/24 for example
- The ability to reserve some IP range out of DHCP (Highly valuable)
  - If you can reserve or select which range of IPs are going to be used, you can reserve 10-15 IPs, so taking the above example of IPs you could set the pool of IPs to be from 10.20.10.2 to 10.20.10.243 this way you will have from 243 to 255 unassigned. ( This is going to be needed/useful later on when using a Load Balancer, which will take an IP from the pool you give it, so you will be giving this free IPs which won’t be assigned by your DHCP )
- The ability to assign static IPs (Really useful)

The need for a router with this capabilities is because we will be setting up apps and services in our homelab, and having this features in our router will allow us to do a lot of cool things like having a domain in our local network or being able to assign a specific IP to a machine and not worrying about our URLs or configurations stopping working.

2. BIOS

Is recommended before engaging in this Homelab setup to have everything in your hardware/firmware up to date, so you will need to update your bios to the latest version, something that is highly individual depending on the motherboard but the process should be as follows:
- Turn off completely your machine
- Turn it back on after a couple of seconds
- Spam : Del, F2, F5, F11 (Depending on the BIOS, you should get this information during boot on your screen)
- Look at the BIOS information written on top, whatever the BIOS it is it should be something like:
  - MSI Click Bios
  - ASUS Bios Utility
- After getting some of this information, go google that, plus upgrade
- You should get to a site where you specify some more information like your motherboard brand and model
- Download the upgrade and put it in a USB flash drive
- Follow the instructions in the site you downloaded it, it is usually booting to bios again and looking for upgrade options, selecting the USB flash drive and waiting for it

2.2 BIOS Settings

After upgrading the bios, it is needed to look for Virtualization options and making sure that they are enabled
Ensure IOMMU is enabled
(Optional) There are issues that may need you to disable the following options:
- CSM
- Secure Boot

I disabled them just in case to be sure no issues will arise after I started

3. GPU Video BIOS

This part is not mentioned in any guide but is highly recommended for the same reason that it is upgrading the BIOS

I ran into an issue, after doing everything by the manual, my GPU was recognized and everything but passthrough wouldn’t work as intended, the only clue I got was, that the metadata of the card wasn’t being listed when seeing it in the list PCI commands and in Proxmox PCI devices options when adding PCI devices to a VM, so after digging a bit deeper I had to flash the last ROM of my Graphics Card and it worked flawlessly after that, so having this step as a prerequisite is a good practice.

Go to https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/
Filter your Graphics Card, model and vendor ( ~~You could play here with ROMs from other vendors and could result in bricking or increasing performance a little bit, but I wouldn’t play with it~~ )
Download the latest ROM ( Look at the dates )
Having the ROM downloaded now it time to flash it to the GPU

Here the steps are strongly individual ( Depending on which GPU brand you have ) So I recommend going on https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/ and look for a guide or just straight up google “Flash {{BRAND}} {{GPU MODEL}} Rom” for example and you will get plenty of articles and guides on how to flash your specific GPU

4. (Optional) A cool USB Flash Drive: Ventoy

If you have been in the situation of having 5 different USB sticks and having each one of them port a different Linux distro, and forgetting which one is for what, then you have been struggling having an unnecessary battle…
Let me present you Ventoy, a minimal OS (Yeah, Ventoy in itself is a mini OS) that when you boot it up, it will let you boot any ISO available in the USB stick where it is installed. This way you could install Ventoy in a 64GB USB stick, and fill it with all your favorite distros, and then not having to worry about any other USB stick for your Linux ISOs (~~I think it don’t work quite well for Windows ISOs but I might be wrong~~)
If I sold you the idea, just head to https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html and follow the steps, they are straight forward and take less than 5 minutes to do.

Having covered everything, is time to get our hands dirty and install our Super Type 1 Hypervisor and responsible for making our machine a virtualization beast 🦁 : Proxmox

If you have done the pre-requisites, you can head to the next article and continue your journey with me towards your dream homelab.