Published Jan 20, 2026, 7:00 PM EST
Anurag is an experienced journalist and author who’s been covering tech for the past 5 years, with a focus on Windows, Android, and Apple. He’s written for sites like Android Police, Neowin, Dexerto, and MakeTechEasier. Anurag’s always pumped about tech and loves getting his hands on the latest gadgets. When he’s not procrastinating, you’ll probably find him catching the newest movies in theaters or scrolling through Twitter from his bed.
Enterprise high availability usually means buying expensive rack servers with redundant power supplies and IPMI management cards. The hardware alone costs thousands before you even think about software. But what if you could build a proper HA cluster using old laptops collecting dust in your closet? That is exactly what I set out to do, and not to boast, but I seem to have achieved that feat (to some extent, at least).
I put together two aging laptops and ran Proxmox Virtual Environment to form a high-availability cluster that survives node failures and keeps virtual machines running. Mind you, this is not a toy homelab that crashes when you sneeze near it. This is a real HA architecture with quorum voting and automatic failovers. The laptops just happen to have built-in UPS systems in the form of batteries and integrated consoles that servers charge extra for.
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Preparing the hardware
And understanding the storage issues
The biggest mistake people make when repurposing laptops as servers is forgetting that laptops are designed to disappear and reappear. They are meant to sleep, hibernate, roam between networks, and aggressively save power, and every one of those behaviors is catastrophic in a cluster. So before doing anything else, I turned both laptops into something that behaves like boring infrastructure.
I started by installing Proxmox VE directly on bare metal on both machines, avoiding installing it inside another operating system or virtualizing it. Proxmox expects direct access to disks, networking, and power states, and adding another layer underneath only introduces unnecessary failure points.