Building a Homelab environment: Part 1 (Choosing the server)
Background
Hello there, I have been dabbling with cloud providers as AWS, DigitalOcean and Azure for quite sometime. The opportunity provided by the cloud is great most often when you require it’s native features like high availability, scalability and managed services. I wanted something more to develop my skills without paying much in cost.
So I decided to build a homelab to pursue learning about virtualisation, system architecture and administration.
Important factors to consider in choosing a server to host the homelab
- Power consumption
- Noise levels
- Performance per $$$
Consider the space you are living:
- Apartment/Sharehouse
- house with garage
In building a homelab there are two options
- Buying a refurbished server
- Building your own PC
Buying a refurbished server
There are refurbished server equipment which are available on Ebay and other websites. These refurbished server’s are enterprise level equipment that have been discarded after use and often have a few good years left in them. They have a cheaper upfront cost with high running costs but it’s a good option if you have garage space and worry less about the noise levels.
Refurbished server’s may have processors which are quite old and consume more power relative the performance it offers.
I’ve gone with building my own PC since I live in an apartment.
Building a PC
CPU
I wanted a processor which had a lot of cores and the best fit for me was the AMD RYZEN 7 2700 with 8 cores. The cheapest option I found to buy this processor is using AliExpress.
Motherboard
Focus on the connectivity and future expansion here, High bandwidth gigabit network ports will get you more throuhput. Additional RAM slots allow for future expansion Number of storage disks accomdated and supported RAID formats.
These days Motherboards have options for PCIE NVME storage but may come at cost of disabling a couple of SATA ports.
RAM
Choosing the RAM sticks mainly depends on the amount of workload that VM’s will run. To run a basic tier of workload 16Gb of RAM should be sufficient.
I would recommend 32Gb of RAM as it would be able to handle most workloads for study purposes.
Storage
Selecting an appropriate storage configuration is important.
Think what are your requirements, what services will be running ?
If you want to have a NAS then I suggest buying an HDD 1TB or 2TB.
It’s better to buy a SSD to store the hypervisor OS and VM’s
Here is my PC build hardware list,