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 started my homelab with a small form factor PC (not a NUC specifically, but similar). They can be very capable servers, depending on specs and your needs.
As for towers, you can do standard consumer workstations, too. I game on PC, so when I build a new rig every 3 or 4 years, my old one goes in the closet. Sometimes I just add it and have another server, sometimes I donate the current server to a friend or school. Point being, you don’t have to have a Threadripper CPU and ECC RAM to run a server.
That being said, if you plan on hosting critical services or non-critical-but-public services that you want to have high availability and stability, it might be a good idea to upgrade to enterprise hardware eventually. But definitely not needed if you’re just starting out or running personal, non-critical stuff.