Not offended because you are 100% correct. I do need to learn how to automate this stuff, and as a lab, I tear it apart regularly. The only thing I considering keeping is buying a license for MS Server 2025 for my AD, DNS, DHCP, etc. which runs on a standalone mini-pc. The longest I’ve had a version of Server Evaluation running has been about 18 months before trashing it and starting over, still not sure if I’ll keep it long enough to license.
That said, my learning curve is really steep on this, still trying to find my way around. I approached this from the wrong end, while Harvester covers up the need to understand Kubernetes for most tasks, you still need that baseline for more complex things. That’s a mistake I found the hard way, and something I will need to study up in the very near future.
As far as my lab goes, it’s an under powered cluster of three HP T740 thin clients. 64gb ram, 1tb sata, 1tb nvme, and the above mentioned networking with the addition of an Intel i226v in the WiFi slot, and the on board Realtek that I’m not planning to use. You’d be surprised how well this same cluster worked with vSphere8 back when I had a license, and how well it works with XCP-ng. I do have a small Truenas Scale on 10g that I use for shares, a little n100 powered board with sata drives.