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.
I just want to say that I don’t love the NUC for homelabs; mainly that it only has one NIC. I also don’t like USB NICs because I’ve had too many problems with them dropping out without any obvious cause, and then working again by simply unplugging them and plugging them back in. I don’t like to have to be that hands-on with my lab, I just want it to work.
If you’re okay with the limits of a single NIC, then the NUC is a great option; for my homelab, I actually run a storage network, so I generally need two NICs; one for production/front-end traffic, and one for storage/back-end traffic.
Beyond that gripe, you could do a lot worse than a NUC for your homelab. You may be able to save some money if you get an off-lease Core i5/i7 business class system, and the mini/micro systems that are available are quite good, even in the used market. If you want new, I’d probably say the NUC is going to be one of the cheaper options, even considering the tiny/mini/micro systems that are out there. I’ve used several tiny/mini/micro for small processing systems; one example of this is a DNS server; in another case, I used one for HomeAssistant. Neither system relies on external storage (no storage network requirement), so they performed quite well.
I know most people don’t run a storage network, and just use containers/VMs on local storage, so if that’s you, or you’re just starting out, any tiny/mini/micro or NUC will do quite well.
I don’t have experience with the NUC for my own homelab and kubernetes, but the main things I will say with any kubernetes is the RAM. I have 4 servers on VMware (just to get experience there) and then have Rancher (like Openshift) across them (both a management server and then a 3 VM cluster). Every resource is important, but the RAM is what was eaten up before anything else for me. I have Lenovo Tiny m910q (x 4) with 64GB and that allows me a full on cluster and then some with other VMs too.
Sounds like you made a good choice going with a NUC and 64GB ram. You just may find you want to add another or two depending how much you go beyond just experimenting with k8s and using it to host most of your homelab services.
Whatever you do, don’t go 12 enthusiast at the moment.
It seems lots of people (including myself) are having issues with the GPU and Linux at the moment. It only works for some during a soft reboot.
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.
NUC is good choice. Cheaper is eBay Lenovo M900s. You would just have to buy more to max same memory and CPU.
You could start much cheaper with a refurbished thin client or a older laptop. Those work very nicely as homelab servers as well.
A new NUC is not really better than those as you will likely not need that much CPU/ram and the expandability is equally bad.