After receiving the Dell PowerEdge R720 server, I set it up in my home office and booted it to confirm it was working properly. I used Rufus to write an .iso of Proxmox VE onto a USB drive and changed the BIOS settings on the R720 to boot from the USB drive.
The server was hard-wired via Cat 6 cabling into a switch in my office and placed on a separate subnet I intended to be dedicated to the homelab. This way, all of the VMs could have unique IP addresses and I could firewall the lab from the rest of my home network.
I considered using VMWare ESXi for the hypervisor on the R720, but the R720 only supports version 6.x. The latest release of this software, 6.7, will reach the end of its life in October 2022. I didn’t want to install a hypervisor that would soon no longer be supported, potentially leading to security vulnerabilities. Thus, that is how I decided on Proxmox, another benefit being that it is open source.
After installing Proxmox, configuring the iDRAC, and assigning both static IPs within the lab subnet, everything is ready to go. Even though I don’t plan on exposing this server to the internet, I setup Proxmox with MFA for added security. Homelab here we come.