Recommendations on first Homelab hardware: NUC or not?
Recommendations on first Homelab hardware: NUC or not?
Hi,
I need help with my first homelab hardware. Maybe you experts can help me with that. I looked at this tutorial about building your own Openshift one node cluster using an Intel NUC, though I’m unsure, if I really should buy one of these.
I have set a budget of 1000€ (I’m located in germany). The tutorial suggests the Intel NUC10i7FNK, which I can get for 450€ new here (would buy 64GB RAM and a 2TB M.2 SSD for that). And I would follow the tutorial in getting a dedicated router for my lab environment.
Can I get more for my money (also in terms of upgradability) with some other product? Or should I just get that suggested NUC? I don’t need it to be that small (can be a tower), but I don’t want real server hardware, since the lab will run in my home office.
Thanks in advance for your help. My brain hurts from comparing products, searching for their availability, etc.
EDIT:
I've now decided to buy the NUC10i7FNK. It seems to be a sensible choice and the tutorial says, that it has enough beef for my first goal of building my own Openshift cluster for experimenting.
Thanks to all of you! You helped me to get to a good decision in this wide field of home lab equipment.
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NUCs make really nice homelab servers. They can give you a lot of power while not sucking too much electricity. I have used three NUCs to build a kubernetes cluster and I'm very happy with them.
The only thing that made me buy additional hardware was the need for 10Gb Networking and more internal storage, which I couldn't realize with my NUCs. I also learned to love the IPMI feature of server motherboards, that NUCs don't offer afaik. I would recommend to use a hypervisor like proxmox which makes it easy to spin up new servers inside virtual machines - this way you don't have to re-install your OS on the NUC everytime something goes wrong or needs to be upgraded.
Generally a NUC is a great device for a homelab, especially if you're just starting out!
Since you're also located in germany, I'd like to share a site I found when I was looking for my own router based on OPNsense: NRG Systems. Some of their models use pretty old hardware, but I got the IPU651 with the 19" chassis and I really love it.
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