Three years ago I bought Raspberry Pis 'to learn Kubernetes' and never opened the boxes. This is what I did with them once I finally admitted that wasn't happening — and the repeatable baseline that means I never have to think about Pi setup again.
$ grep -l "#Beginner" /blog/*.mdx // 3 matches
#Beginner
How I took two refurbed office desktops and made them into the two-node Proxmox setup that runs every VM in my homelab. Why refurbs, why not full HA, and every gotcha I hit installing PVE for the first time — so you don't.
Two used mini PCs from a corporate refurb lot, four Raspberry Pis from a Kubernetes project that never happened, and a NAS I saved for. Every decision I made along the way — Proxmox, Debian, Ansible — and why.