Well, greetings people of the internet—Unkyjoe here. In this first episode of my Hyper-V homelab rebuild, I’m getting my Windows lab back on its feet with two very different boxes: a Dell R730 on Windows Server 2022 and a Lenovo SR650v2 on Windows Server 2025. I bounce back and forth between Proxmox and Windows all the time, but I needed a sign to bring Windows back into the mix—and Proxmox GPU passthrough gave me one. With dual Tesla P40s passed through to a Windows VM, I kept hitting CUDA errors where LM Studio and Ollama would refuse to use the second card. Under Server 2022, both cards behave, so Windows wins this round as the right tool for the right job. From there I dig into the practical side: building clean VM templates, sysprepping them, exporting them, and trying to move those images between 2025 and 2022 Hyper-V hosts. Spoiler: Hyper-V config versions aren’t backward compatible—my 2025-created VM (config v12) won’t import into 2022 (v10). So the takeaway is simple: build your base templates on the oldest Hyper-V you plan to keep around. I also run into the TPM/Key Protector issue moving Windows 11 LTSC with TPM enabled, plus a sysprep failure caused by BitLocker being turned on—so we disable encryption and keep going. Episode 2 is where I fix the TPM import mess and keep the lab moving.