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.
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.
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.