Need advice for a newbie on building a homelab
Need advice for a newbie on building a homelab
I'm pretty much new to all things homelab as I've only started looking into it because of my job. I'm relatively new to my position (first job I got after getting my degree), so I wanted to learn more about virtualization and other related tools that could help me.
I want to practice using VMs and such. VMware vCenter, ESXi, PowershellCLI, Microsoft Windows Servers, RHEL, and others. And while my work does provide me a remote production environment for these, it's not always available to me. A lot of other people work on them and I can't really just go in and start messing around.
So I've been looking into getting a homelab setup for myself. I'm just not really sure what I should be going for, though. Do I get a Dell Poweredge Rxx0? I do have a PC of my own that I've been using with Hyper-V and VMware Workstation to create VMs of what I mentioned, but I dunno if I should just get a dedicated server or not? Should I just upgrade my RAM and add in some SSDs on my PC and would that work fine for me?
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For performance per dollar nothing beats used enterprise gear due to how little you can pick it up for on eBay. Now if you live somewhere where electricity isn't stupid cheap or you don't have a good way to mask the sound of a 1000 angry hornets, then enterprise might not be the way to go. Dell SFF PCs can make good servers. You can also go a long ways with just humble raspberry pis, get a whole bunch of them and you can use that to learn K8s too
Electricity isn't cheap at all here and I do live in a small apartment, unfortunately. It's why I want to know if just making some changes to my main desktop PC would be better, as that would allow me to save on space, electricity, and heat.
I do have two Rasperry Pis right now. One of them I run Pihole on at the moment.
For what you have going on, a used laptop would be great. Pick one up with a broken screen, and take out the magnet in the lid. Most laptops use a hall sensor or reed switch to tell when the lid is closed and send a sleep signal.
The one issue with pi is that you can't use some x86 server software. I have a seafile instance for by NAS and that was a pain to get running on my pi4
I would suggest you either use the RPIs you already have or try to get an old laptop somewhere that you can use as a beginner server.
You desktop PC is likely a gaming PC and those aren't optimized for server use. It can work, but it isn't really a good way to start out.
I do have an old laptop. Can you tell me why it's better to run a server on an old laptop than a gaming pc, though?
Much lower power-consumption and built in UPS. Usually also more quiet and since it has a built in screen and keyboard, it is easier to recover from user errors compared to RPIs for example. Disadvantages are mainly the limited storage expansion options, but that is unlikely to be a problem for a beginner.
If you can get a laptop with a few USB ports that can go a long way to helping with storage expansion. Try to avoid USB drives and SD cards, but attaching proper SSDs and HDDs with a USB caddy is a great option. Just don't accidentally pass the boot drive USB controller to a vm like I did once.