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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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 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.
What is your job? Do you have exposure to life cycled hardware?
Dedicated router hardware with your os of choice, 2 hp desktop minis (or equivalent) for virtualisation and some sort of harddrive for a Nas that you can scale as required.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reliability and lower power consumtion than most Frankenstein-DIY cheap stuff recommended here ;)
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…
Id go to https://labgopher.com/ and find some cheap, newish hardware. Would not buy anything brand new.
I would buy a single n305 mini pc with at least 2 2.5gb nics, and maybe a godlike pc for vm’s to play around 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)
mini pc to run pfsense on , used managed gig switch, used dell server from ebay. Buy some decent drives with what’s left over.
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