Building a Dedicated Test Homelab on a Lenovo IBM System X3100 M4

Most homelab stories start with a single machine and slowly grow into a small data center.
This one starts from the opposite direction: a stable primary homelab already exists, and I needed a separate place to break things on purpose.

That is how the Lenovo IBM System X3100 M4 became a dedicated DevOps test environment—a sibling to the main Proxmox homelab documented in Proxmox Homelab: Your Private Cloud and the blog Homelab: Why Every DevOps Engineer Should Have One.

Why a Second Homelab Instead of Just “More VMs”?

The primary homelab already runs:

• Long‑lived services.
• Reference architectures for tutorials.
• DNS, reverse proxy, and monitoring that other content depends on.

That environment needs to be boringly reliable.

By contrast, this X3100 M4 node is explicitly for:

• Kubernetes version experiments.
• CI/CD runner testing.
• Infrastructure as Code demos in Terraform/OpenTofu.
• DNS and networking labs that might temporarily break name resolution.
• Reverse proxy and TLS experiments.
• Observability and security tools that may spike CPU or disk.

Having a physically separate server means:

• I can reinstall or re‑image without worrying about taking down the main site.
• I can try riskier ideas (e.g. aggressive kernel tuning, experimental storage layouts).
• I get a cleaner story for future tutorials: “everything in this guide runs on the X3100 test node”.

The full hardware and cost breakdown lives in the project page
→ Lenovo IBM System X3100 M4 Homelab Test Environment.

First Impressions of the Lenovo IBM System X3100 M4

The System X3100 M4 is very much an enterprise tower:

• Intel Xeon E3‑1220 v2, 4 cores / 4 threads.
• 32 GB DDR3 ECC Registered (4 × 8 GB).
• 1 TB NVMe SSD on a PCIe x16 adapter.
• Onboard Gigabit Ethernet and room for more NICs.

It feels like a small office server that has been given a second life. Compared to a modern mini PC:

• It is larger and louder, especially during POST and fan ramp‑ups.
• Idle power draw is higher.
• But it brings ECC memory, proper airflow, and expandability that tiny boxes simply don’t have.

For a test lab where experiments run for hours or days, those enterprise traits matter more than chasing the lowest possible wattage.

Bringing It to Life with Proxmox VE 9

To keep the stack aligned with the rest of BeingDevOps, the X3100 runs Proxmox VE 9 as the base OS.

• Proxmox gives me VMs, storage, and snapshots in a familiar interface.
• It matches the platform used in the main Proxmox Homelab project.
• It lets me roll forward and roll back experiments without reinstalling bare metal each time.

The installation itself is straightforward:

1. Adjust BIOS on the X3100 M4 for virtualization and USB boot.
2. Download the latest Proxmox VE 9 ISO from the official site.
3. Use Ventoy on a 32 GB USB 3.0 pendrive to create a multi‑ISO boot disk.
4. Boot the server from USB, select the Proxmox ISO, and walk through the guided installer.
5. Assign a static IP 172.100.12.253, hostname node1.test.beingdevops.com, and set the root password.
6. After reboot, access the UI at https://172.100.12.253:8006 and log in as root.

If you want the exact, reproducible flow, see the detailed tutorial:
→ Install Proxmox VE 9 on Lenovo IBM System X3100 M4.

What This Test Node Will Run

With Proxmox 9 in place, the plan is to layer on a focused but flexible stack:

• Kubernetes via kubeadm for cluster lifecycle and upgrade testing.
• Traefik as the ingress / reverse proxy for internal services.
• CoreDNS and additional DNS experiments (forward and reverse zones, split horizon).
• Prometheus + Grafana for metrics and dashboards.
• GitHub self‑hosted runners for CI/CD experiments.
• Supporting services like local registries, demo apps, and security tools.

This environment is not about “how many services can I cram onto one box.”
It is about how cleanly I can model real‑world DevOps problems on a single, well‑understood node.

How This Fits with the Existing BeingDevOps Homelab

From a documentation point of view:

• The primary homelab (Proxmox cluster, DNS, reverse proxy, etc.) remains the reference architecture.
• The X3100 M4 test homelab is the experiment playground.

Future tutorials and blogs will clearly call out which environment they target:

• “Runs on the main Proxmox homelab” vs
• “Runs on the Lenovo X3100 M4 test node”.

This project page and this blog are the anchor references for the latter.

Why Refurbished Instead of New Mini PC?

Short answer: expandability and realism.

• The X3100 can take more RAM, more disks, and more NICs over time.
• It behaves like the kind of small enterprise server you might actually find in the field.
• ECC memory and proper thermal design make long‑running tests less stressful.

The tradeoffs are real:

• Power usage is higher.
• It is not silent.
• It requires more physical space.

But for a dedicated DevOps lab, those tradeoffs are acceptable—and the INR cost breakdown on the project page shows how approachable this kind of build can be with refurbished parts.

What Comes Next

From here, the X3100 M4 test homelab will evolve in small, documented steps:

• Kubernetes cluster creation and upgrades.
• Traefik and DNS patterns for internal and external routing.
• Observability stacks that can be torn down and rebuilt easily.
• CI/CD runners wired into real pipelines.
• Comparisons between this refurbished server and smaller, modern options.

Each major step will become either:

• A tutorial under the Homelab section, or
• A blog post that tells the story behind the engineering choices.

Both will link back to:

• The project: Lenovo IBM System X3100 M4 Homelab Test Environment
• And this test homelab blog, so readers can see not just the “how”, but also the “why”.