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
The top question on yer decision tree is :
is zfs part of it or not ?
If it is, you need either a midtower/nas case with a decent amount of sata ports - like 4 or more. Or install a HBA in a pci slot which implies again a midtower or enterprise server. So if you want ZFS … all PI’s and nuc/TinyMiniMicro’s are out.
But you can do all the rest with them : linux, vm’s, containers, reverse proxies, clustering… you name it. Just know your backup strategy will likely involve rsync which is fine. But factor in backup in yer design from the getgo, not just an afterthought.
I just looked up what zfs is and I don’t think I need to go with that for now since I’m only testing at the moment.
I was finally able to set up vCenter with two ESXi VMs after enabling nested virtualization. I’m out of RAM now just running those and a Windows 10 VM, even after adjusting the initial RAM settings lower. I was hoping to add some more VMs and a domain controller, but I think I might have to get more RAM than 32gb right now.
I respect that.
Just keep in mind that the storage part of any setup you consider is the hard part. It also involves backup, which should be high on your priorities.
As to Windows, l’m indebted to Bill for my livelihood… but for your testing, there is little value in virtualising windows OS: because you already know how Windows works. Go for linux instead, there’s a lot more going on there. And you can run linuxes with a lot less ram.