I don’t know about Mikrotik, but it might also be interesting to buy something, that is running on OpenWRT, an open source router OS. That way you would have maximal configurability. I recently purchases a GL.iNet AXT1800 for my own home lab (though I’m currently only using it for the isolated homelab, not for the rest of the house). You can even host stuff directly on the router with OpenWRT. I currently have Centos 9 repos hosted there and DHCP/TFTP for network installation of VMs via PXE boot.

I know, that GPUs are often problematic with linux, mostly due to driver issues. I’ve had my share of this with my ubuntu desktop. Or is there currently something new/specific, that I missed? Either way I currently don’t want to do things with GPUs.

I want something with some beef on it. I want to experiment with an Openshift cluster and that needs quite some resources. So I decided to go with the mentioned NUC.

Ok, I will check them tomorrow (I really need to sleep soon, as its already 2am). I mainly want to experiment with different technologies, that I already know from work. Openshift, Docker, Puppet and Ansible for example.

Currently I’m not focussing on media stuff, more on experimenting with different technologies, that I use for work (like Openshift, Docker, Puppet, Ansible). Having dedicated hardware, that gets me further than some small VMs on my PC will be great for that.

Though I might move to media stuff in the future. Heard a lot about jellyfin, for example. Though then I need to upgrade my home network too. It still is limited to 100mbit. But I already have wired connections through most of the house.

Thanks for your fast answer

It’s good to know about the possibility with thunderbolt network adapters. I think I’ve already read about that somewhere. At this point I haven’t really though about high speed network connection (my home network still runs on slow 100mbit routers and switches). Thanks for that tip

Ok, that sounds like a solid recommendation for the NUC. I think I can live without IPMI, especially since this is the start of my homelab (besides my RaspberryPis)

I’ve heard a lot about proxmox and I will definitely try it out before any other solution. Running VMs and containers side by side is a great plus.

At this point I haven’t really looked at the router-with-custom-firmware game. I heard about openWRT and OPNsense, but I definitely need to do some research on that. Interesting site, though it looks terrible on mobile.

Thanks for your recommendations

In fact I already have a Synology NAS, that I have my backups on. I guess as long as the data connection doesn’t need to be high speed, I can use some space on that (or even upgrade the 2TB space in my NAS in the longrun). So I probably don’t need a full tower. My main concern was, if a NUC would be overpriced in relation to other similar products.