Dell Poweredge budget server. R720 can have good specs for cheap on eBay. Get a ubiquiti switch for vlans. Firewall brand of your choice I did tz400w. You should have some money left over to buy an endpoint as well. Then install VMWare and build out a vm environment of your choice. I chose windows just to continue learning the systems I administer.

I’d buy the highest memory GPU I could get my hands on and slap it in my computer. I’d be playing with AI because it’s probably going to replace us all in the not too distant future.

People are probably going to be like “wELl Ai HaLOOOsiNaTes or GetS ThiNgs WRonG”. Yep, and so do people. We also had vacuum tubes and literal bugs before we had transistors and metaphorical bugs. This isn’t a steady march to computers everywhere. This is a sprint to see who replaces all thinking work with AI agents first. The controller of the most successful agents will own the labor force.

So, either learn to build and repair the looms or become a luddite. Focus your lab money on AI.

A bigger NAS with more drive bays

Will do almost what i have now: compact (ITX/mATX) board with C612/2600v3/v4, maxxed with memory. SAS board/NVME/10G if you want/need. Silent and efficient for 24/7

I would do pretty much what I do now with two mini PCs and my desktop PC running background services in a three node cluster. I change my mind too often though and just did a bit of a rebuild over the holiday, so by next weekend I may have a completely different goal.

I having considered replacing the desktop with a laptop for more portability.

I would also not mind getting a 2.5 Gbps switch. I have all 2.5 Gbps devices on the network except the switch which is a little silly.

I’d separate my storage and put that in its own server.

Then, I’d probably go for multiple low energy sff “servers” instead of one powerfull one.

I would buy a second hand workstation with all the pcie slots I could. They are bargains, and you can pull / upgrade cpus as needed. Need more ram? Put the second cpu in. Don’t need it? Pull it out.

A couple of gen9 Proliant servers. They’re cheap, easy to source, plenty powerful for a homelab, have surprisingly good power management, and they’re much quieter than previous generations (because of the power management). If you go with LFF drives, you can find surplus ones which have plenty of room for homelab stuff. SAS drives are so cheap, I’ve bought enough extra drives to replace any which fail.

For instance: https://www.ebay.com/itm/284061636798 is less than $200 with dual CPUs, a RAID contoller, and iLO for out of band management. You can source memory on eBay for cheap (for instance https://www.ebay.com/itm/266287238575), and as I mentioned, SAS drives are so cheap they’re almost disposable (https://www.ebay.com/itm/225874909271).

So total cost for one of these servers with 128GB memory and four 8TB (24TB usable with RAID 5) drives would be $463.48. You could spin up two of them for less than your $1,000 budget and be able to do a BUNCH of cool stuff with them. Or you could just pack one with like 512GB memory and do everything on one server with virtual machines.

On my gen 9 DL380s with 12 4TB drives, I’m getting ridiculous disk speeds:

[root@neuromancer vms]# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=16M count=1024 oflag=direct status=progress
16475226112 bytes (16 GB, 15 GiB) copied, 10 s, 1.6 GB/s
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
17179869184 bytes (17 GB, 16 GiB) copied, 10.3636 s, 1.7 GB/s

So over a gig and a half per second direct I/O writes. I spin up VMs on these servers in literally minutes, and I’ve got enough memory to have dozens of virtual machines. I have RHEL, Fedora, and Windows machines (my wife is a Microsoft sysadmin, she tests stuff on those).

The downside is that even with good power management, they do draw a fair amount of power and generate a fair amount of heat. I have three of these in my home office, and during the summer, it kept my office slightly warmer than I like.

For the OS, I use the free developer edition of RHEL - those skills are very marketable. https://developers.redhat.com/. I use RHEL for my VMs so I can play with stuff like NFS services, the automounter, user management, even stuff like OpenShift cluster members as VMs. I’ve learned a lot using my homelab, and it’s helped my career a lot.

That’s about $1000 more than most people have.

My suggestion is invest in networking equipment but it will not cost you $1000. Maybe a switch and a couple mini PC’s and if you have to buy used retail it’s maybe $200. If you want to get into NAS and streaming than you’re looking at spending some money because reliable, preferably fast storage is a must and expensive

I would buy a single n305 mini pc with at least 2 2.5gb nics, and maybe a godlike pc for vm’s to play around with

Id go to https://labgopher.com/ and find some cheap, newish hardware. Would not buy anything brand new.

Dedicated router hardware with your os of choice, 2 hp desktop minis (or equivalent) for virtualisation and some sort of harddrive for a Nas that you can scale as required.

Had to do this when I moved countries. Went from multiple HP Microservers down to a 2014 Mac Mini that handles TimeMachine backups and my photos and a Lenovo M93p that’s been upgraded as far as it can go with a few terabytes of external storage. Potent enough to run the odd VM when I need to test something, and comfortably runs Docker for HomeBridge, Phoscon, and file shares.

For 1k i would start with a Unifi UDM-Pro, a Intel NUC and a Synology NAS.

Bought a Dell R630 from ebay for a decent price, but I wish I’ve had spend more on larger capacity hard drives. I bought a bunch of old 600GB HDD running RAID 10 that right now im afraid to replace them.