Setting up a home lab

[Malystryx]

Hey guys, I'm looking into setting up a home lab, but I'm not sure what hardware to go with yet exactly. First off I'm looking for something simple, just one server for now to start with (we always add later right?). I'm going to run VMware on it since we are going to be virtualizing at work in about a year, I'd like to be a couple steps ahead of the game. I'm mostly going to use it as a file server. I currently use a couple 500GB USB drives and have less than 1TB of total data. But I want redundancy and reliability with my data now. This is one of the bigger reasons for wanting to setup a home server along with learning VMware. At first I was going to pickup a Dell PE 2950 off ebay (we use all Dell servers at my workplace), but after reviewing a lot of other's home labs here I see a lot of SuperMicro servers. I'd like to stay around the $200-$250 range (without drives is fine). Is there a preferred budget server you guys go with?

 

[_Gea]

Prefer hardware with:
- Intel server chipsets and the cheapest Xeon (socket 1150)
- with an additional LSI HBA storage controller

ex. http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon/C220/X10SL7-F.cfm

this gives you ECC RAM (use min 8GB) and vt-d (hardware pass-through)
that is essential to virtualize storage

- use ESXi 5.5U2
- use a ZFS storage VM
my config, see http://www.napp-it.org/doc/downloads/napp-in-one.pdf

with new parts, you are at 500$ (mainboard, LSI HBA raidcontroller, Xeon, RAM)
maybe you can look at used parts or a Dell T20 as an option with an additional HBA
but expect a HBA not as good as the one that is on the SM board in the 100+ $ area

 

[piker28]

The other thing you might want to look at is where it will go and will you use it full time. The 2950 will eat alot of juice and possibly be noisy. As said above I think you will need to double your budget or build a more custom desktop to run your setup. I have a couple Dell's and a Supermicro for my home lab. One downside to alot of supermicros is they can be pretty loud if you are not careful.

 

[firedrow]

If you can snag a Dell C1100, those a pretty good 1U machines for the price. I know they seem to fly out the door like hotcakes though. My company bought several 2U Supermicro servers for the chassis's, then we gutted them and re-used the chassis with newer internals. So I snagged a dual CPU board with 32GB of memory, moved it to a 4U Norco chassis, and purchased Norco SS-500 drive enclosures for the chassis. Works like a champ.

 

[nicholasfarmer]

If you are just wanting hardware to "play" with, you could even consider using the Intel NUC.

I just created a VSAN cluster with three i5 Intel NUCs.
Each NUC has a 120GB msata SSD, a 2TB Samsung spinner, 16GB of ram and two wired network adapters (yes two - onboard and a mpcie nic under the msata ssd)
The three Intel NUCs are near silent. They use maybe 20 watts each. Since I use them as a VSAN cluster my vm data is replicated across three Nodes and I don't need shared storage.

I understand the VSAN idea is advanced but the simple idea of having 120 up to 1TB msata ssd and a 2TB spinner inside a single NUC makes an awesome ESXi server for a few VMs. Im running three Infra VMs, a database server and two web servers on a single i5 NUC and they respond amazing.

I had the Server equipment, I then moved to the desktop side to reduce power, heat and noise. Now this NUC cluster is fitting all my needs with less everything.

Just some more ideas to help with the home lab...

Nicholas Farmer
@vmnick0

 

[peanuthead]

How much RAM do you need? Processor size?