Turning an Old Alienware Into a Proxmox Home Lab (and Beating Optimum Router Limitations)

I was recently given an old machine by a colleague a 2015 Alienware X51 (16GBs RAM, 1TB SSD). Instead of letting it collect dust, I saw an opportunity to turn it into a home virtualization lab running a Type-1 Hypervisor bare-metal where I could further explore various open-source projects. 😁

The ESXi Roadblock

My initial plan was to install VMware ESXi. However, I quickly ran into issues.

After some digging, I discovered that VMware had dropped support for many Realtek network card drivers (which my Alienware machine had). On top of that, older ESXi versions weren’t playing nicely with the system’s BIOS. I tried VMware 7.0.3, 8.0.3 and they ran into the “No Network Adapters” error. I also tried VMware version 6 and that wan’t compatible with the BIOS.

At that point, ESXi was no longer an option and I had to look for other options.

Discovering Proxmox

That’s when I came across Proxmox a powerful, Debian-based Linux server virtualization platform used to manage VMs. They had me sold at OPENSOURCE and LINUX 😂.

I downloaded Proxmox 6.4 and created a bootable USB using Rufus. Interestingly, my main computer didn’t recognize the USB at all , which had me second-guessing the process. But when I plugged it into the Alienware and booted from it, everything worked perfectly.

From there, the installation was smooth, and I finally had a working virtualization environment.

First Project: Pi-hole

With Proxmox up and running, I decided to start with something practical: Pi-hole.

What is Pi-hole?

If you understand how DNS works, Pi-hole is easy to grasp.

Whenever you visit a website, your device sends a request to the DNS server to resolve a domain (like www.example.com) into an IP address. The same thing happens when ads load your device makes DNS requests to ad servers.

Pi-hole sits in the middle and blocks those DNS requests to known ad domains. If the request never resolves, the ad never loads. This works very impressively as it blocks ALL THE ADS ON ALL YOUR DEVICES. That means no ads on free games you play on youe iOS devices or Android devices.

The DHCP Problem

Installing Pi-hole itself was straightforward. The real challenge came afterward.

My home network uses an Optimum-provided fiber gateway, which handles both internet access and Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow much control over DHCP settings. That meant I couldn’t control what DNS server address devices got when they connected to the home Wi-Fi.

Ideally, I would configure the router to hand out Pi-hole as the default DNS server to every device on the network. But that wasn’t possible (thanks to the Optimum provided router’s limitation)

The Workaround

Instead, I came up with a simple workaround:

• I connected the Alienware (running Proxmox) directly to the network via Ethernet.
• This made the Proxmox host — and my Pi-hole VM — accessible to all devices on the network.
• I assigned a static IP address to the Pi-hole VM.
• On each device where I wanted ad-blocking, I manually set the DNS server to the Pi-hole’s IP address.

It’s not as seamless as a network-wide solution, but it works reliably.

The Result

With this setup:

• Ads are blocked at the DNS level
• Tracking domains are filtered out
• Network traffic is cleaner and faster

And all of it is running on a repurposed 2015 machine that would have otherwise gone unused.