RHEL Hypervisor Homelab Setup: Live Ops 003
A Dell PowerEdge R730 that’s been sitting in the rack collecting dust finally has a job: and this stream is the whole messy process of giving it one.
The goal was straightforward: install RHEL 8 on bare metal and get the R730 running as a RHEL hypervisor homelab host. But rather than just grabbing a stock ISO, I went straight to Red Hat Image Builder on console.redhat.com, because if you spent years doing TPMM work for RHEL, you use Image Builder. The hosted build queue had other ideas though, and what should have taken a few minutes turned into a 40-minute wait that only resolved after I kicked off a second build to shame the first one into finishing.
Once the ISO was finally in hand, getting the Dell to actually boot from it proved to be its own adventure. Wrong boot order, a RAM upgrade the server needed a moment to accept, and the classic “it wasn’t broken, just needed more time to transfer over the network” diagnosis courtesy of guest heckler Nate, the Iron Sysadmin. The install itself went smoothly once RHEL 8.10 got its turn: custom partitioning, a dedicated Ansible service account, kdump disabled, and TuneD set to virtual-host profile so the system optimizes for running VMs rather than general workloads.
After the install, I wired the box into Red Hat Insights, which is included with any RHEL subscription and immediately flagged a handful of advisories, two of which were auto-remediable via an Ansible playbook without ever leaving the Insights UI. Cockpit got enabled, the virtualization host package group went in, and I spun up a test VM to confirm everything was working. I wrapped the stream with a local Image Builder instance installed on the hypervisor itself, laying the groundwork for generating golden VM templates for Fedora, CentOS Stream, and RHEL without depending on the hosted service.
Watch the full stream above, and if you want to follow along as the homelab build continues, subscribe to the channel or grab the audio version of the main show at podcast.itguyeric.com.
