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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Id go to https://labgopher.com/ and find some cheap, newish hardware. Would not buy anything brand new.
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…
3 optiplex 7040s micros - put 32gb ram and a 2tb ssd in each and call it a day
I figure you need to buy networking equipment too?
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.
Legit same
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
Would you also recommend 7050 if those are available?
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
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
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.
What is your job? Do you have exposure to life cycled hardware?
I got an enterprise class 19" short depth chassis, whit supermicro motherboard and a xeon D (they are soldered to motherboard) whit 8 cores at 2.something GHz, multithreading and so on. Bought a 128GB ecc ram kit and a pair of intel enterprise 1TB ssds. Installed proxmox, whit mirrored discs, and it’s now running 8 containers and 3 vms. Really low power consumption, just a bit loud but perfect for the garage. Placed inside an ikea lack table and mounted up above a door. Avoid buying consumaer class ssds as they are gonna last you only a few months in a configuration like this (that comes from experience, 20% wear in 6 months whit the initial Kingston I bought)
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?
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
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.
- 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.
Where do you got these drives/disks from?
bargainhardware.co.uk is my usual source; even though I now pay import taxes, it’s still often the cheapest option. (±€30/disk on my last order)
Wish I had skipped the Frankenstein and mini PC steps.
Here’s two reasons enterprise servers are the way to go:
- Remote management is awesome. Remote KVM, remote serial terminal, mounting ISOs remotely. If your homelab is in a not-so-accessible place (e.g. cupboard or garage), this saves so much frustration.
- High quality rack rails. You’re more likely to be tinkering around the back of your server than a company that throws it in a data centre. It’s almost like rack rails were built for homelabs.
I wouldn’t worry too much about noise. $1000 will easily get you an R730 or T630.
$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!