Daniel Thiele IT - daniel@dproject.de

My homelab originally used a Cisco Catalyst 3560X as the central switch between the Proxmox host, ESXi host, physical Windows client, and another physical system. The switch was useful for learning enterprise switching, VLAN configuration, access ports, trunks, and Cisco IOS. However, there was one disadvantage to keeping an older enterprise switch running continuously: power consumption . Some calculations from another chat pro Jahr = per year. Gerät Angenommene Nutzung Verbrauch pro Jahr Kosten pro Jahr Cisco WS-C3560X-24T-S 93 W, 24/7 814,7 kWh 285,14 €  There are other measures I have to take, but this was the easy first step in reducing costs. After reviewing the electricity consumption of the homelab, I decided that the Cisco switch no longer needed to be part of the permanent 24/7 infrastructure. The goal was therefore not to remove the Cisco from the lab completely. Instead, I wanted to change its role: The Cisco switch remains available for networking labs, but is powered ...

From Active Directory to a Real Hybrid Windows Sign-In How I Used ChatGPT and Codex to Run an AI-Operated Employee Lifecycle in My Homelab I already had the hybrid Microsoft environment. See my VMware and Server 2025 post for documentation. Active Directory was running on DC01. Microsoft Entra Connect synchronized a deliberately limited part of the domain into my test tenant. CLIENT01 remained my cloud-only Intune client, while the physical computer STEUERN was my Hybrid Microsoft Entra Join pilot. So the next question was not really: Can I create another user? I already knew how to do that. The more interesting question was: What happens if I give an AI administrator access to the lab and tell it what business outcome I want, instead of telling it which buttons to press and which commands to run? That became this experiment. I wanted ChatGPT and Codex to provision a fictional employee through the complete hybrid identity chain: Active Directory ...

This homelab demonstrates how to build and expand a VMware-based Windows domain environment with Active Directory, virtual and physical clients, Group Policy, backup and recovery, printer deployment, and remote power management.   Because the project is too large for a single article, I divided it into smaller PDF documents. Each document covers one milestone of the setup and contains the practical steps needed to reproduce it. I will later add to this project and expand on it with Azure, MS365 and more. That will be updated here. 0 – ARES ESXi and Veeam Preparation Preparing the physical ARES computer for VMware ESXi, creating a Veeam backup, and making sure the existing Windows installation can be restored safely as aVM. 0 ARES_ESXi_Veeam_Preparation_Tutorial.pdf   1 – Restore the Windows VM on ESXi Creating a virtual machine on ESXi and restoring the previous Windows system from the Veeam backup. 1 ARES_ESXi_Windows_VM_Restore   2 – Set Up the vSwitch, Port Groups, and...