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)?
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.
, but $1,000 in cash
not sure how this would help me, I’ve spend 10k or more, but I could get a t-shirt I guess?
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.
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
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.
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.
I will just get a nice amd board with ipmi and dump a good Ryzen cpu, Any linux, be debian or any Rhel based distro or even Proxmox and tons of drives plus a few nvme raids. Pretty much about that
- Supermicro H11SSL-N6 with an Epyc 7551P with 128G memory - €600
- PSU - €60ish
- Pile of refurb 4TiB disks - €100
- Mikrotik hAP ax² - €80
- HP Procurve 2848 - €40
- Misc gubbins - €180
There’s a server, networking gear, and storage. I can sort the rest out later.
$1k wouldn’t get me started for the electrical runs and cabinets for the hardware.
Just chiming in that the consensus on Mini PC clusters is pretty cool.
Completely agree. That’s where it’s at!
I have a rack full of R710s that barely get used anymore because energy is so freaking expensive. I’d either do everything in the cloud or use lots of low powered machines at home.
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 bigger NAS with more drive bays
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.