I recently came across a sale post on facebook for a number of decommissioned Wyse thin clients. The guy was selling it for $20 a piece. Normally I’d just scroll past that but I for some reasons I was feeling especially low-bally that day so I asked, half-jokingly, if he’d be willing to part way with some of them for $10 a piece. To my surprise, he actually said yes. I guess he probably bought a shipment from China thinking it was some kind of SFF workstations. Anyway, long story short, I now have 4 Wyse thin clients that I don’t know what to do with.

Or do I really?

I’ve always wanted to get into building a homelab, and this just give me more motivation to do it. While I do have a home ‘lab’, I don’t really have a real home server to put inside it. I had an old Q6600 antique that I use from time to time to watch DIY videos but let’s face it, it can never cut it as a real home server.

I’m thinking of building a dual xeon server with a healthy amount of RAM as a central server, running Proxmox or ESXi, serving the thin clients that I will be distributing around the house. So far I think I could replace my father’s, mother’s, my wife’s and maybe even my workshop current computer with a simple thin client. Not only does this setup saves a lot of space downstairs, it may actually provide a performance boost for my parents as they’re current using very old computers.

Xeons are super cheap these days, as do ECC RAM modules. The only pricey part is perhaps, the motherboard.

(to be continued…)