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I was more of a statement of "oddity". People with these grandiose gaming setups want "a datacenter" that needs to be many times more powerful but don't want to pay anything for it.
Those people should just turn on Hyper-V inside Windows 10 Pro and go at it.
For some. But other want a rack, dual managed 10Gbit switches, 128 cores of compute power, 10Gbit SAN with SSD.... for $200.Those people should just turn on Hyper-V inside Windows 10 Pro and go at it.
Actually it's more like after purchasing their gaming system, then they want a 208" OLED panel or ultra laser setup .... for $100.
Better point than mine
.
I mean, I bought my Dell R710 for $150 ( a few years ago)... And it was a learning tool. I upgraded the ram to 96GB (Thanks [H] forum) for cheap, threw an older 255GB SSD in, got 6 spinners from the forums and set them up in raid 10. I don't have 10gb Ethernet, but have recently been looking. I have like $250 into this thing total and it does what i want no issues (Plex, Minecraft server, development server, file share server, and a few other odds and ends for use and/or testing). Not sure why you think looking to save money for a hobby is wrong. If I planned to run this in a professional environment, sure I'd spend a few more coin on things. For my house as something the learn and play with, who cares if someone doesn't want to fork over $6000. PS. My gaming PC (itx) build (I do more development than gaming) cost me about $400, but I have 5 desktops, one for each of my family, so my budget is very spread out. Given that my server doesn't do anything a basic desktop couldn't handle, I don't feel it appropriate to spend that much on it. Your priorities are your own, go ahead and blow $15,000 on your server, doesn't bother me one bit, so why does someone not wanting to spend that much bother you?
I think your really really really missed my point. You do not have a mega zillion dollar setup. Not even close. Now... if you have a 364TB SAN going to redundant controllers each with 10Gbit links to your redundant 48 port top of rack switches going to your redundant core (and that's just in rack #1)... and you got all of that for $200 USD... then yes, you have made your point.
The point was not missed, I understand some expectations are unrealistic, but that doesn't mean I wasn't looking for as much as possible for as cheap as possible. I didn't expect to walk away with 10gbe for my $150 server, but that didn't mean I didn't try to find it. Sure expectations can be to high, but if you don't ask you'll for sure never get it.
You can't say you are planning on building multinode cluster but then can't elaborate one what exactly that means and can't articulate the use case. That's why I asked what exactly does that mean to you? Hadoop, Elastic Search, or maybe some Kafka? Or even vm / container orchestration? Maybe some nginx reverse proxy load balancers? Your original post, number 2 said you wanted to do multinode clusters, home lab etc etc for sub 200$. It can't just mean whatever because there should be a use case. Just running some plex server doesn't count. I'm very much from the mind set of, "I have a problem to solve, and this is the budget I have to do it with". If you have no problem to solve, there is no budget to spend. Even if this stuff is just a hobby and you just want it because you want it? Totally OK. This hobby is very expensive, and nothing sucks more then spending a bunch of money on gear that will sit idle. I only feel like I get my moneys worth on the 3 boxes sitting in my house when all 3 are running 95% full blast all the time.
Yes, but most people that build a "datacenter" I their home are doing it to tinker. You can run stuff slowly and still learn... It's really hard to have fun gaming at 10FPS. I mean, people prioritize and are willing to sacrifice on some things and not others. I mean, the last car I bought I paid $250 and have been driving it for the last 8+ months but spent over $1k on computer parts in that same time frame. Someone else probably bought a brand new Tesla for $60k and bought a $150 chrome book. They aren't related, it is meaningless to compare. Who cares where people want to save/spend their money, not sure why it's such a big deal to you guys what others feel like spending their [H]are earned cash on. Good on you if you have the money to spend on a $3k gaming system and a $10k home server. Others don't have the luxury and want to skimp, so the skimp on the one they feel they don't care as much about, but still want to dabble.
I think maybe many of you are missing my point. When I said $200 max, I wasn't kidding. Not $500, etc... You folks are thinking I'm shaming them for not spending tens of thousands of dollars (or more). In fact, I'm shaming them because they have set their sites so so so very low budget wise and their expectations so so so very high. And all that in light of spending tons of money on something they're going to completely destroy in a few years.
I understood the point, but you're talking about people who are just trying to get into this stuff and have no clue about prices. Most gamers know how much $ a GPU costs for a certain performance level and know how cheap they can get 5+ year old stuff for. They incorrectly assume server parts that are old are going to be dirt cheap and are seriously ignorant on the subject. Either way they aren't looking to spend lots of money to learn about something they are curious about trying out. They already know they like gaming and are willing to spend $ to play. This idea that they're fine spending money on gaming but don't want to spend a lot on a server is my point of contention. If you would have just said they are unrealistic and ignorant about server costs, then I agree. If you say because they are willing to spend $ on a gaming box but don't want to spend a lot on a server, then that's their prerogative. I was just saying that making a correlation between the two is silly as they have different purposes. I do agree with you that there are plenty of people with unrealistic expectations, but I still find nothing wrong with trying to get into an interest as cheaply as possible.
I certainly don't have a problem with a bargain. It's just funny. "Give me the $2000 iPhone 13 please, and the $5 bluetooth ear buds."
What kind of unrealistic expectations are you seeing ?
Pretty random. I want a storage server that can go to 200TB, but for less than $300. I want a pair of 48 port 10Gbit switches, but for less than $400 total. Stuff like that. Some will find their fortune in their own company's "giveaways"... but .... sometimes that can cause it's own cascading set of problems. Sometimes to get the "high end" whatever, requires a bit more.... for example, "I got my 12 dual P4 servers setup, but it's too loud and too hot." "I tried to plug in the Equallogic, but it keeps throwing my circuit breaker."
I think you need to reset your expectations on what you can do with the budgets you have in mind, and you also need to reset your expectations on how folks acquire gear from their company. 300$ for 200TBs of storage is fantasy. I'm on org number 4 in 20 years. The only "free" thing I ever got computer wise from any of my companies was an old intel p3 tower back in 2001. I totally get your point of reference to some extent. Yes, a few get lucky and get gear.. but I can tell you first hand that a lot of that gear is so old, the only way to get any support for it, including any kind of downloads for it is to pay for it. So.. its not "Free" anymore. Also, the folks that have access to a "free" equallogic array will want nothing to do with it outside of their production environment because they know the level of effort it will take to keep it online at home. Getting gear like that is super rare. Most companies that can afford that level of gear, are also also bound to SOX and PCI compliance. Giving that gear away to employees is a major risk. The org can not confirm the data was properly wiped from those frames so they would rather destroy it and write it off, vs risk having a major data leak.
You can download 180 day trials for Server 2016 and 19 from microsoft.
I'm seeing if work will get me a VL MSDN license to tinker with so I can do some cloud servers and play.
just found this below in Azure FAQ:I'm seeing if work will get me a VL MSDN license to tinker with so I can do some cloud servers and play.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/licensing-faq/
That's nice, I'm not wanting the MSDN for the cloud OS licenses. I want it for the 150 a month in covered cloud costs.
What exactly are you or were you doing with your home lab? You've never really elaborated on what you are doing, much less your goals with it. your posts are vague. If you want to see what I'm doing, click on the link in my sig.. you can see my home hobby running my production code running on my production server.
LOL... yeah.. I think some in here took your initial post seriously
But you know, I am tempted to start a thread of homelab discussion, since there does seem to be interest in "showing off the lab".
totally missed all that. Didn't get that from your posts. Now I get the direction and your thought process. I guess its depends on peoples priorities and budget. Depends on the hobby and the goal. Nothing wrong with a 10k gaming rig or a 10k home lab. Neither are right or wrong. Both are dictated by goals, priories, and budget.
I agree and disagree. There's the whole "software side" of things... and indeed, we're sort of in the age of not dealing with a lot of hardware. But, there are still some hardware only devices out there (perhaps shrinking market though). Anyway, a "lab" is whatever you want it to be.