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)?
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2-3 second hand small form factor PC’s running Proxmox, cheap 2 bay Synology NAS for backups.
Where would your primary storage live?
2 bay?
mini pc to run pfsense on , used managed gig switch, used dell server from ebay. Buy some decent drives with what’s left over.
get a synology nas instead of a giant enterprise server. I only boot it when i need to use it as the power consumption is so high.
I’d buy the highest memory GPU I could get my hands on and slap it in my computer. I’d be playing with AI because it’s probably going to replace us all in the not too distant future.
People are probably going to be like “wELl Ai HaLOOOsiNaTes or GetS ThiNgs WRonG”. Yep, and so do people. We also had vacuum tubes and literal bugs before we had transistors and metaphorical bugs. This isn’t a steady march to computers everywhere. This is a sprint to see who replaces all thinking work with AI agents first. The controller of the most successful agents will own the labor force.
So, either learn to build and repair the looms or become a luddite. Focus your lab money on AI.
3 optiplex 7040s micros - put 32gb ram and a 2tb ssd in each and call it a day
I would only add a single SFF so that I can fit a couple of big 3.5 disks for my backup and data hoarding needs.
Other than that, yeah… Micro/tiny/micro is the way
Legit same
I figure you need to buy networking equipment too?
I already have one 7040 Micro and I really wish I had two more for this exactly. Just cluster those puppies.
An am4 mobo+4500 = <150 euros. Cheap atx case + psu = 75 Leaves you 75 for ram to price-match those 7040 with lots more expandability and ecc support.
I like the optiplex micros because they’re small
This is what I did with 3060s. Eventually added a 4th, because… well… 3 is less than 4 and I had an empty slot in my rack.
Would you also recommend 7050 if those are available?
For 1k i would start with a Unifi UDM-Pro, a Intel NUC and a Synology NAS.
Honest question… Why people with knoedge on how to do one, buy a Nas like synology? Are you not just paying double or triple for the same result you could have if making the NAS from scratch?
No, you are not paying anywhere near double or triple.
My Synology came in at ~$750 for the chassis and 2 8TB IronWolf drives.
A custom build with TrueNas was coming in at over $1k.
Hm, yeah maybe I just don’t know the pricing/cost of a Synology then.
In my country just the price of a 8Tb IronWolf drive costs almost 1 entire month of the minimum wage here.
The cheapest Synology NAS available here is the DS223J, and it comes with no drives included and costs 80% of two months of minimum wage.
It’s way cheaper to repurpose old hardware or buy from AliExpress and make a DIY build, there is no comparison and also I have no idea of what “custom build” are you mentioning, as most NAS builds I’ve seen are pretty cheap as you don’t need much horsepower and DDR4 memory has low prices nowadays.
Reliability and lower power consumtion than most Frankenstein-DIY cheap stuff recommended here ;)
We use Synology at work to avoid paying CALs on a WS VM
I bought a qnap a long time ago, never again…it was like 3k with disk for 6 x 6TB drives like 10 years ago. They constantly get hacked, a bunch of their NAS’s were getting crypto lockered because some Dev hard coded an admin password iirc. their software does a bunch of shit I dont need and it runs like shit now with just me using it. I’m gonna reset it soon once I get my data off.
My NAS now is a r730xd with 12 x 12tb drives in it running true nas. Granted my electric bill is a car payment with all my stuff, it only cost me like 1,500 for disk and the server was super cheap and has a 10 gig connection.
Granted some of it is cool if you are still learning like 1 click and you can have a mysql php server on there ect. I thought about getting a synology but all the bells and whistles it can do with apps and that I can just run on a real server.
I regret getting a UDM-Pro and recently swapped it for an n5105 OPNsense box. Luckily they keep their value, so I didn’t lose any money on the UDMP.
Why do you regret that choice?
I have a UniFi system: APs, switches, CKG2, Gateway. I’m looking to add CKG2+ and some POE cameras
After my past Ubiquiti experiences I can’t agree on the UDM…
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.
https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ Small foot print, low wattage, modern CPU can run anything I can try and throw at it just get a lot of ram. Id run Ubuntu or Debian all apps go in docker containers, maybe install cockpit if I wanted web gui. And run vms if I want via KVM https://ubuntu.com/blog/kvm-hyphervisor If you want to go nas Plex rute you can add a hd via 10g usb Great level1techs video about mini PC home server https://youtu.be/GmQdlLCw-5k?si=VrdfDRfmpNHCZz-H
Everyone here recommending tinylabs, but what if you need lots of TB’s? Is there a solution then? I have a Microserver Gen 8 (which is plenty powerful enough) but need way more space, and was going to buy something that can fit 10+ Hard drives…
There’s lots of solutions.
Cheap:
But a full tower PC case with room for 10+ HDDs. Lot of options like those from Fractal, CoolerMaster, etc.
Enterprise (expensive):
Buy a JBOD with a backplane that you plug all your discs into then plug that into a server.
can you make ZFS pools across devices with Proxmox? Otherwise idk what you do for storage redundancy or RAID unless you run like longhorn or ceph or something across the cluster - all those machines have a single drive
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
UDM-PRO, USW-Aggregation, USW-Enterprise-24-POE, U6-LR… build a server with i5/32GB NVMe boot drive, then some RAID drives… I took out a loan in this scenario as $1,000 wouldn’t cover my entire rack getting blown up.
What is your job? Do you have exposure to life cycled hardware?
Depends on the requirements. Is the purpose to learn virtualization management? Linux sysadmin stuff? Virtual networking + firewalls? For my purposes it’s all of the above and more.
Having said that, I have not had an ounce of trouble out of Intel NUC 12 Pro NUC12WSHv5. So for $1000 I’d start with that and add NVMe storage and max ram in my budget. Running ESXi 8.
I would buy a single $1000 42u rack…
And do what with it? if your budget was $1000 and you only bought a rack, it’d be empty.
That’s it. A $1000 rack and call it a day! Done.
Homerack achieved
All used: 2019ish Intel NUC i7, 32-64GB RAM, run ESXi 7, 4 Bay QNAP or Synology with a Celeron, 8TB spinners, TP-Link ER605, an Omada POE switch, and an Omada AP.
You end up with a great setup for VMs, a reliable Plex server using the NAS CPU, multi-WAN, rock solid VPN, and a UniFi/Meraki like experience, and you don’t notice it on the electric bill, your ears, the shelf, or the room temperature.
This doesn’t differ at all from my existing setup. My only regret was not starting with 64GB of RAM on the NUC instead of the 32GB I started with.