Hi,
I need help with my first homelab hardware. Maybe you experts can help me with that. I looked at this tutorial about building your own Openshift one node cluster using an Intel NUC, though I’m unsure, if I really should buy one of these.
I have set a budget of 1000€ (I’m located in germany). The tutorial suggests the Intel NUC10i7FNK, which I can get for 450€ new here (would buy 64GB RAM and a 2TB M.2 SSD for that). And I would follow the tutorial in getting a dedicated router for my lab environment.
Can I get more for my money (also in terms of upgradability) with some other product? Or should I just get that suggested NUC? I don’t need it to be that small (can be a tower), but I don’t want real server hardware, since the lab will run in my home office.
Thanks in advance for your help. My brain hurts from comparing products, searching for their availability, etc.
EDIT:
I’ve now decided to buy the NUC10i7FNK. It seems to be a sensible choice and the tutorial says, that it has enough beef for my first goal of building my own Openshift cluster for experimenting.
Thanks to all of you! You helped me to get to a good decision in this wide field of home lab equipment.
You could start much cheaper with a refurbished thin client or a older laptop. Those work very nicely as homelab servers as well.
A new NUC is not really better than those as you will likely not need that much CPU/ram and the expandability is equally bad.
I want something with some beef on it. I want to experiment with an Openshift cluster and that needs quite some resources. So I decided to go with the mentioned NUC.
I echo the other commenters, a NUC is a great beginner system for homelab; if all you want or need is minimal resources. For learning enterprise management or workloads, I’d say you need a full fledged server. There is nothing in common with a NUC and a Poweredge, for example. What is your homelab for you? A few VMs and one disk system attached to a COTS NAS? NUC will be fine. Wanting to learn to manage a Server with full on RAID, hot swap drives and 64G ram? You’re gonna want a server.
IMO NUCs are wonderful for a homelab beginner for 1. the vPro/AMT capability (that you’re skipping on for some reason) 2. the ability to go passive with aftermarket cases. If neither if that interests you, they’re… not much better than an equivalent laptop?
NUCs make really nice homelab servers. They can give you a lot of power while not sucking too much electricity. I have used three NUCs to build a kubernetes cluster and I’m very happy with them.
The only thing that made me buy additional hardware was the need for 10Gb Networking and more internal storage, which I couldn’t realize with my NUCs. I also learned to love the IPMI feature of server motherboards, that NUCs don’t offer afaik. I would recommend to use a hypervisor like proxmox which makes it easy to spin up new servers inside virtual machines - this way you don’t have to re-install your OS on the NUC everytime something goes wrong or needs to be upgraded.
Generally a NUC is a great device for a homelab, especially if you’re just starting out!
Since you’re also located in germany, I’d like to share a site I found when I was looking for my own router based on OPNsense: NRG Systems. Some of their models use pretty old hardware, but I got the IPU651 with the 19" chassis and I really love it.
Ok, that sounds like a solid recommendation for the NUC. I think I can live without IPMI, especially since this is the start of my homelab (besides my RaspberryPis)
I’ve heard a lot about proxmox and I will definitely try it out before any other solution. Running VMs and containers side by side is a great plus.
At this point I haven’t really looked at the router-with-custom-firmware game. I heard about openWRT and OPNsense, but I definitely need to do some research on that. Interesting site, though it looks terrible on mobile.
Thanks for your recommendations
You can take a look at Aoostar R1, there is 2 bay option with Intel N100
I started my homelab with a small form factor PC (not a NUC specifically, but similar). They can be very capable servers, depending on specs and your needs.
As for towers, you can do standard consumer workstations, too. I game on PC, so when I build a new rig every 3 or 4 years, my old one goes in the closet. Sometimes I just add it and have another server, sometimes I donate the current server to a friend or school. Point being, you don’t have to have a Threadripper CPU and ECC RAM to run a server.
That being said, if you plan on hosting critical services or non-critical-but-public services that you want to have high availability and stability, it might be a good idea to upgrade to enterprise hardware eventually. But definitely not needed if you’re just starting out or running personal, non-critical stuff.
I just want to say that I don’t love the NUC for homelabs; mainly that it only has one NIC. I also don’t like USB NICs because I’ve had too many problems with them dropping out without any obvious cause, and then working again by simply unplugging them and plugging them back in. I don’t like to have to be that hands-on with my lab, I just want it to work.
If you’re okay with the limits of a single NIC, then the NUC is a great option; for my homelab, I actually run a storage network, so I generally need two NICs; one for production/front-end traffic, and one for storage/back-end traffic.
Beyond that gripe, you could do a lot worse than a NUC for your homelab. You may be able to save some money if you get an off-lease Core i5/i7 business class system, and the mini/micro systems that are available are quite good, even in the used market. If you want new, I’d probably say the NUC is going to be one of the cheaper options, even considering the tiny/mini/micro systems that are out there. I’ve used several tiny/mini/micro for small processing systems; one example of this is a DNS server; in another case, I used one for HomeAssistant. Neither system relies on external storage (no storage network requirement), so they performed quite well.
I know most people don’t run a storage network, and just use containers/VMs on local storage, so if that’s you, or you’re just starting out, any tiny/mini/micro or NUC will do quite well.
Whatever you do, don’t go 12 enthusiast at the moment.
It seems lots of people (including myself) are having issues with the GPU and Linux at the moment. It only works for some during a soft reboot.
I know, that GPUs are often problematic with linux, mostly due to driver issues. I’ve had my share of this with my ubuntu desktop. Or is there currently something new/specific, that I missed? Either way I currently don’t want to do things with GPUs.
Nah… Actually… They’re generally good these days. The 12 Enthusiast NUC is an exception. It’s either an ARC Driver bug, a power management issue, or something similar. The NUC 13 series even offer official Linux support