For reasons unexplained, you have no homelab hardware, but $1,000 in cash earmarked for the purpose.
What are you buying, what are you installing on it, and how is it different from what you’ve done previously (i.e. lessons learned)?
You must log in or register to comment.
I would buy a second hand workstation with all the pcie slots I could. They are bargains, and you can pull / upgrade cpus as needed. Need more ram? Put the second cpu in. Don’t need it? Pull it out.
Dedicated router hardware with your os of choice, 2 hp desktop minis (or equivalent) for virtualisation and some sort of harddrive for a Nas that you can scale as required.
Had to do this when I moved countries. Went from multiple HP Microservers down to a 2014 Mac Mini that handles TimeMachine backups and my photos and a Lenovo M93p that’s been upgraded as far as it can go with a few terabytes of external storage. Potent enough to run the odd VM when I need to test something, and comfortably runs Docker for HomeBridge, Phoscon, and file shares.
Dell Poweredge budget server. R720 can have good specs for cheap on eBay. Get a ubiquiti switch for vlans. Firewall brand of your choice I did tz400w. You should have some money left over to buy an endpoint as well. Then install VMWare and build out a vm environment of your choice. I chose windows just to continue learning the systems I administer.
I’m still a beginner at it, but I would say to not over prioritize cores. Ram will be your bottleneck first. I day this as someone with 36 physical cores and like 90% of them idle
u/diffraa , this is a key point.
At $dayjob, we use 4 GB per core for application workloads and it works well. Databases get 16 GB per core. Memcached gets 32 GB per core. In development we use 16 GB per core because there isn’t heavy load.
My own homelab is built around a bunch of quad cores with 32 GB of memory. The memory has come in useful. Having 64 GB per quad core would be even better, but was not possible when I built the systems many years ago (I bought super cheap $40 motherboards with only two slots). For my initial purpose getting 2x 1 GB sticks would have been enough, but I’m glad I bought more as I use all the memory now.
If you don’t know what you want to do, I would get 8 GB of memory per core at minimum, and in a lightly loaded homelab, 16 GB per core is totally reasonable. I would only get less memory if you know you’re going to hit the CPUs hard with particular tasks that share memory or use little memory, and even then I would get minimum 4 GB per core.
N5105 nas board, 32-64gb of ram, 1x 500gb nvme SSD, some sort of case, and a bunch of HDDs, I like the 8tb ironwolfs, they are cheap enough, but large enough.
Maybe the n6005 if you can find it. But it’s a great server, handles most selfhost stuff. I run Ubuntu server on it, it’s just the cleanest and easiest to use, no GUI needed.
What’s nice is it’s super low power, and cheap. So you can eventually migrate to a more powerful Proxmox server, on minipcs, like NAB6, than just turn the n5105 into a TrueNAS server, and even duplicate it for backups, and triplicate (if you are really feeling it), for redundancy. Getting a 2nd and 3rd Proxmox minipcs enables HA on VMs. So yea. That’s my goal. ATM I gotta migrate to the Proxmox.
I loved migrating to 3 nucs from a 2015 synology, so think you are 100% correct. (It allowed me to use TB networking for a 26Gbe ceph network)
TB = Thunderbolt?
Same but with a N100 motherboard. Asus and Asrock have some ITX boards with this chip.
Buy a new N100 microPC with 32GB RAM and m.2 drive, Sabrent 5-bay USB_3 DAS, a couple 10TB drives. Easy low-power single box home server with room to expand. You also could add a good switch and box of Cat8 (cable always > WiFi)
Spend the rest on another hobby!
A bigger NAS with more drive bays
Will do almost what i have now: compact (ITX/mATX) board with C612/2600v3/v4, maxxed with memory. SAS board/NVME/10G if you want/need. Silent and efficient for 24/7
I would do pretty much what I do now with two mini PCs and my desktop PC running background services in a three node cluster. I change my mind too often though and just did a bit of a rebuild over the holiday, so by next weekend I may have a completely different goal.
I having considered replacing the desktop with a laptop for more portability.
I would also not mind getting a 2.5 Gbps switch. I have all 2.5 Gbps devices on the network except the switch which is a little silly.
A couple of gen9 Proliant servers. They’re cheap, easy to source, plenty powerful for a homelab, have surprisingly good power management, and they’re much quieter than previous generations (because of the power management). If you go with LFF drives, you can find surplus ones which have plenty of room for homelab stuff. SAS drives are so cheap, I’ve bought enough extra drives to replace any which fail.
For instance: https://www.ebay.com/itm/284061636798 is less than $200 with dual CPUs, a RAID contoller, and iLO for out of band management. You can source memory on eBay for cheap (for instance https://www.ebay.com/itm/266287238575), and as I mentioned, SAS drives are so cheap they’re almost disposable (https://www.ebay.com/itm/225874909271).
So total cost for one of these servers with 128GB memory and four 8TB (24TB usable with RAID 5) drives would be $463.48. You could spin up two of them for less than your $1,000 budget and be able to do a BUNCH of cool stuff with them. Or you could just pack one with like 512GB memory and do everything on one server with virtual machines.
On my gen 9 DL380s with 12 4TB drives, I’m getting ridiculous disk speeds:
[root@neuromancer vms]# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=16M count=1024 oflag=direct status=progress
16475226112 bytes (16 GB, 15 GiB) copied, 10 s, 1.6 GB/s
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
17179869184 bytes (17 GB, 16 GiB) copied, 10.3636 s, 1.7 GB/sSo over a gig and a half per second direct I/O writes. I spin up VMs on these servers in literally minutes, and I’ve got enough memory to have dozens of virtual machines. I have RHEL, Fedora, and Windows machines (my wife is a Microsoft sysadmin, she tests stuff on those).
The downside is that even with good power management, they do draw a fair amount of power and generate a fair amount of heat. I have three of these in my home office, and during the summer, it kept my office slightly warmer than I like.
For the OS, I use the free developer edition of RHEL - those skills are very marketable. https://developers.redhat.com/. I use RHEL for my VMs so I can play with stuff like NFS services, the automounter, user management, even stuff like OpenShift cluster members as VMs. I’ve learned a lot using my homelab, and it’s helped my career a lot.
I’d separate my storage and put that in its own server.
Then, I’d probably go for multiple low energy sff “servers” instead of one powerfull one.
Id go to https://labgopher.com/ and find some cheap, newish hardware. Would not buy anything brand new.
Bought a Dell R630 from ebay for a decent price, but I wish I’ve had spend more on larger capacity hard drives. I bought a bunch of old 600GB HDD running RAID 10 that right now im afraid to replace them.
At least 2 mini desktops with as much RAM and ssd that I can get I’m it. Running proxmox and truenas and then setting up my jellyfin, homeassistant, and the rest will be a playground. I am a simple man