How to Build a Windows Server Home Lab from Scratch

If you’re starting your journey into Windows Server or Active Directory, one of the best investments you can make is building your own home lab.Reading documentation helps. Watching videos helps. But nothing replaces breaking something yourself — and fixing it.
This guide walks you through building a practical Windows Server lab from scratch, even if you’re just getting started.

Why to Build a Home Lab

A home lab gives you:

• A safe environment to experiment
• The ability to practice without fear of “breaking production”
• Real troubleshooting experience
• Confidence during interviews

Most importantly, it helps you understand how systems actually behave — not just how they are described in theory.

1. Choosing your Harware
   • CPU – 4 cores minimum
   • RAM – 16GB minimum but 32 GB recommended
   • Storage – SSD or NVME (100GB SSD for Boot and 1TB for Storage)
   • Network – Standard Home Broadband
2. Choosing a Hypervisor
   • Proxmox VE (Type 1, runs directly on hardware)
   • Hyper-V (Type 2, Built into Windows Pro/Server)
   • VMware Workstation (Type 2 ,Runs on top of Windows)
3. Planning Before Installing Anything
   This is where beginners usually rush — and later regret it. Before Creating a Hypervisor plan accordingly on whats the use case and then install the hypervisor
   • What IP range will I use?
   • What will my domain name be?
   • How many servers do I want?
   • What roles will each server play?