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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If you think you will need more storage space, with a NUC, you will probably need either an external drive or a NAS. If you get a tower, you can add the drives internally. That is my one regret with a mini-pc, I can't add more hard drives.
In fact I already have a Synology NAS, that I have my backups on. I guess as long as the data connection doesn't need to be high speed, I can use some space on that (or even upgrade the 2TB space in my NAS in the longrun). So I probably don't need a full tower. My main concern was, if a NUC would be overpriced in relation to other similar products.
Ahh, okay.
I have a NUC as a family computer and it works well. For my server, I bought a Minisforum mini-pc that works well. My brother got a Beelink mini-pc that he likes. Those are other options you can check.
Ok, I will check them tomorrow (I really need to sleep soon, as its already 2am). I mainly want to experiment with different technologies, that I already know from work. Openshift, Docker, Puppet and Ansible for example.
My homelab started with a Synology NAS as well. At first I put a few VMs on the NAS, and then I expanded the homelab to include a single PC. I almost bought a NUC instead. I’m glad I didn’t, because the NUC only offered one advantage: it was small. Beyond that, the PC was better in every respect. More expandable, more configurable, etc. I decided to get a really small PC case intended for home theater PCs to get some of the smallness offered by the NUC and called it good.