First homelab - Help needed

[S7ewie]

Hey everyone,

 

I’m looking for some help building my first server. I’ve been hopping around reddit and various other forums with varying degrees of engagement and quite a range in response. I’m hoping i’ll have more luck here 

 

I’ve been building my own gaming PCs for about 20 years now but I’ve never built a server so I lack knowledge in hardware requirements.

 

Fair warning, this could be a long post but I want to try and include as much detail as possible, don’t feel the need to respond to everything 

 

Here are my requirements:

• NAS
  • Largely photo & music storage + “some” video
  • Music streaming is a primary focus, I have a large music collection and I’d like to explore options for streaming to other devices (maybe Jellyfin).
  • Potentially “some” media streaming though this is quite low on the list (I don’t mind if I add this later)
  • Space for 4 - 8 drives should be plenty
  • I currently have a small 2 bay Synology NAS that I want to replace with this setup. Partly because I want something more expandable, partly because I want more power and freedom to experiment outside of Synology’s ecosystem.
• Game servers
  • Likely no more than 2 - 3 servers running at any one time (often times none at all)
  • Mostly looking at hosting games like Minecraft, Rust & DayZ etc using docker containers.
  • Probably max 5 - 10 players
• Home automation
  • Something relatively new to me but something I want to explore
• Virtual Environments
  • I’m a software engineer in training so I’d like somewhere to experiment with different OS, maybe host a couple of small websites though I think a lot of this can be done with docker containers these days.

 

After speaking to a few people from other communities, I was starting to lean towards an i5-10400 CPU but then whenever I asked for opinions, I kept getting told to buy enterprise grade components so that’s about as far as I got. I’m quite keen to build my own from consumer parts and one of the absolute keys is that it needs to be power efficient (ideally quiet too). Apparently enterprise grade hardware can be quite power hungry and I’m also likely going to have depth limits so I feel that enterprise grade hardware just won’t be suitable. Lots of people recommend Xeons but I don't know much about those processors so I'm not sure what to be looking at. I know they'll likely mean needing a separate GPU for video transcoding but that's not too much of an issue.

 

I’m thinking rackmount as I’d like to get a Ubiquiti UDM at some point to handle my network.

 

I don’t have much of a budget, I guess I’m aiming around £500 (yes I’m from the UK, but not far off $500) but ultimately I’m just looking for something cost effective. I can spend more but I don’t want to spend thousands if I won’t see that benefit with my requirements.

 

Any tips to get me started and on the right track would be EXTREMELY appreciated. Ultimately just feeling pretty overwhelmed at the moment and not sure where to start.

 

If you made it this far, thanks!! 

 

Stuart

[olimexsmart]

Question: are you willing to buy used?

 

I'm asking because I think that a budget of 500 freedom money is more effective in getting you something off the used marked of pre-build office PCs (plenty of those in the UK on eBay) and upgrade some components (RAM and storage mainly), rather that something brand new.

[S7ewie]

2 hours ago, olimexsmart said:

Question: are you willing to buy used?

I'm open to all options really. At the moment, I don't know enough about the hardware alone to know how much I'd need to spend to achieve what I want. So I think I'd rather learn more about what I need and adjust my budget if necessary to achieve it. Ultimately I'm quiet set on a rackmount system. But I've heard everything from "you can do that with and old unwanted PC" to "you should look at enterprise grade equipment".

I mean I'd like to buy a Ubiquiti UDM at some point so if I need to spend a bit more on the server itself then so be it, its a personal project than I plan to build and upgrade over time.

Efficiency is also a priority. I have herd a lot of older hardware can be quite inefficient so I'd rather spent more to get something more efficient than less for something less efficient.

Ultimately I just don't want to spend thousands on something if I can achieve my goals for much less. I can't see myself ever needing more than 4-8 drives or hosting more than a couple of small game servers at once.. but if my budget is too low.. then I'm not opposed to upping it.

[LIGISTX]

Do you have and old PC’s you don’t need anymore? A used PC is a good way to start, and then you can always upgrade later, it’s a great way to save money up front and start to better understand what your needs actually are. 

[olimexsmart]

Given your budget and your first try, I would start from something like this. You will certainly need to add some RAM.

 

This is a SFF, a full tower would be better especially if you want to add some disks, but it will generally cost you more. Your ebay keywords are Optiplex/Thinkcenter, look for something Intel 8th gen or newer. Be aware that 80% of listings are scam, like explained in a recent LTT video.

 

This will enable you to start to learn to configure everything, and especially find your bottlenecks for your use cases without investing money in stuff you maybe don't need.

[S7ewie]

15 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Do you have and old PC’s you don’t need anymore?

Unfortunately not. I tend to sell my old pc parts when I upgrade. In future though I'll be sure to consider them as server upgrade components first.

 

13 hours ago, olimexsmart said:

Given your budget and your first try, I would start from something like this. You will certainly need to add some RAM.

I kinda wish I hadn't have given a budget now, but whenever I leave it out, its first question people ask haha

 

Thanks, I'll definitely keep a look out. I'm a bit nervous about buying second hand parts from another country though.. particularly if scams are that common.

 

I wasn't really including storage in that budget as I can use what I have in my NAS and build on that later so was mainly thinking about CPU etc. Let's assume the budget is a bit more flexible.. what CPU should I be looking for? Would an i5-10400 do what I want? Or an i7? Or should I be looking at Xeon (+GPU)?

[olimexsmart]

Ahahaha yeah I think that 500$ budget was completely misleading (a couple of 8TB disks and you're done)

 

But you see, that's the point, if you don't have a previous system to replace (along with an existing workflow/tasks) it's difficult to recommend a part list, I would personally start anyway from something dirt chap and see what are your bottlenecks (CPU/RAM/storage/notwork, ecc)

 

P.S. that listing I've linked you was from the UK, but it's gone now

[S7ewie]

Yeah sorry that's my fault I'd overlooked that bit. This budget is mostly for CPU, Mobo, PSU & RAM.

Ohh yeah you're right, it was an ebay.it link so I assumed it was in italy haha.

I've looked around and I think the i5-10400 should be more than capable, it also seems like a pretty energy efficient CPU. I could look to something with a couple more cores but there seems to be a pretty big price jump up from there so I think the i5-10400 looks like good bang for buck.

[LIGISTX]

5 hours ago, S7ewie said:

Yeah sorry that's my fault I'd overlooked that bit. This budget is mostly for CPU, Mobo, PSU & RAM.

Ohh yeah you're right, it was an ebay.it link so I assumed it was in italy haha.

I've looked around and I think the i5-10400 should be more than capable, it also seems like a pretty energy efficient CPU. I could look to something with a couple more cores but there seems to be a pretty big price jump up from there so I think the i5-10400 looks like good bang for buck.

I can’t speak to the game servers, but for everything else, a 10400 will be massive overkill. So unless the game servers need a lot of cpu performance, that will be fine. 
 

I ran my homelab on an i3 6100 for years, and that ran ESXi with VM’s consisting of:

truenas

3x Ubuntu server (one was for Plex)

home assistant

windows LTSC

half dozen docker containers including piehole 

 

CPU was never the issue, I just started to run out of RAM. 

[S7ewie]

From what I can gather, the bulk of the game servers I would want to host all depend on single thread performance which the 10400 should be quite adequate for and give me lots of space to run a few servers at once.. or so that's what it seems from my research.