[SOLVED] Can i turn my gaming PC in to a simple home server or lab for educational / testing purposes ?

[dhantu]

Can i turn my gaming PC in to a simple home server or lab for educational / testing purposes, while still being able to use it for my day-to-day use ?

Hi guys, so i have this gaming PC that i built not too long ago with the following spec:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600x
GPU: Colorful GTX 1660 Super
Mainboard: ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING
RAM: 16 gb 3600 mhz DDR4
Storage: 1 TB SSD m2 NVME, 1 TB HDD Western Digital Blue
PSU: 650w Gold
Wifi: TP Link Wifi Adapter

As a little background, i am a non-IT person (accountant) who recently shifted my career focus in cybersecurity. I want to build a home network or lab in which i could learn on how to administer my own home network (subnetting, setting up access control, etc), test and emulate attacks and intrusions, analyze what logs/artifacts are left behind by these attacks/intrusions, etc. I am thinking about buying cheap windows server OEM license and set up my own domain with VMs in this gaming pc.

Assuming Does all of this viable with my own gaming computer? Or do i need other hardware? And if it is viable, can i still use this pc for my own consumption? (such as gaming, watching movies, etc)?

Thanks in advance!

 

[faalin]

Yes you can do this, Depending on what your doing you might want to upgrade your ram to 32GB and maybe more HDD space. I typically only run 1 vm at a time on my computer (see below) I have each VM set to use 2 cores, 4GB ram, and 128GB of harddrive space, as you can see if you start running more then 1 at a time it adds up.

On a side note you dont have to buy a server license key. You can install any server OS and it will run for 160 days as a trial, after that i think (if i remember correct) it will shut down or reboot every hour. At that point you can just reinstall the OS again and keep moving on, or if your running it as a VM just snapshot it when you first install the VM and then just revert back to it once your time has run out. Will save you time from having to do a full install.

On my work computer i run Oracle VM VirtualBox and have VM's of WIn 10, Ubuntu, Kali, Kali on the network, Linux Mint, Win 7, Win XP no network, Server 2019, server 2016, & server 2008 R2 I can test any piece of our software at work or if we are looking at new software for bugs or issues. Its also nice to take snapshots of fresh installs so if you screw anything up during testing you just blow away the computer and reload the snapshot and your back to square one, instead of spending hours reinstalling the OS.

As for usability, just turn off the VM's and short of lost hard drive space for the vm's you computer will be back to normal and can game on it.

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

Yes, you can absolutely install Windows Server on that machine and it would perform well. No need at all to upgrade RAM or hard drive.

Yes you can use a Windows Server machine for general home use. Watching videos, playing games etc. Some games won’t work on Server, but most will.

 

[USAFRet]

No need to run WinServer on the actual hardware. Win 10 Pro, and a selection of VM's will work just fine.
On my system currently:

In the past I've had more.

And sometimes, 4-5 of the VM's running at once, for development purposes.
A WinServer, and several clients connecting to it...7/8/10

Up your RAM to 32GB.

And don't get "cheap windows server OEM license ". Cheap licenses are very often subsidising criminal activity.

 

[dhantu]

Thanks for the insights!

Yeah i just learned that you could set up the server as a VM too. I initially thought that you have to install server OS on the gaming pc as type 1 hypervisor lol.

I didn't know that those cheap OEM key are actually illegal haha. Its very common here in my (3rd world) country. Guess i'll just follow faalin suggestion on keeping a snapshot of fresh OS installations. Thanks for pointing that out!