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
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
0 points (50.0% liked)
Homelab
371 readers
9 users here now
Rules
- Be Civil.
- Post about your homelab, discussion of your homelab, questions you may have, or general discussion about transition your skill from the homelab to the workplace.
- No memes or potato images.
- We love detailed homelab builds, especially network diagrams!
- Report any posts that you feel should be brought to our attention.
- Please no shitposting or blogspam.
- No Referral Linking.
- Keep piracy discussion off of this community
founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
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.
Same but with a N100 motherboard. Asus and Asrock have some ITX boards with this chip.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
2-3 second hand small form factor PC's running Proxmox, cheap 2 bay Synology NAS for backups.
2 bay?
load more comments
(1 replies)
3 optiplex 7040s micros - put 32gb ram and a 2tb ssd in each and call it a day
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
I figure you need to buy networking equipment too?
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
load more comments
(2 replies)
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
What do you guys do with these home labs?
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
view more: next ›