Homelab Server for Beginner

[heypakputra]

Hi everyone!

 

I'm looking for advice on building my very first homelab. Since I'm new in this space and have budget constraints, here's what I'm planning to build:

 

The homelab server will be a Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 SFF with a Core i5 6500, 16GB DDR4 RAM at 2666MHz (2x8GB), and two SATA SSDs (120GB for OS and 512GB for data). It costs me just IDR1,800,000 (around USD$110 or CAD$160), which is within my budget.

This server will be used for tinkering mostly with Proxmox VE (running some VMs, doing backups, and playing with containers like Nextcloud, Immich, etc.).

 

Is the machine I built enough for my needs, or do you have any alternatives/recommendations?

 

Thanks in advance!

Putra - Indonesia

[Windows7ge]

If you are savvy with or plan to learn about Containerization (PROXMOX LXC Containers) it will let you really stretch those hardware resources.

 

If you need to run full VMs your biggest limiter is going to be those 16GB of RAM and 512 SSD. It's not very much.

 

You can use what's called a Ballooning Device which helps PROXMOX dynamically allocate RAM to VMs as needed but you're going to need to make very small storage disks if you only have 512 to play with.

 

The Intel Core i5-6500 can take up to 64GB of RAM. The Lenovo M900 motherboard also accepts 64GB. This is the first thing I would upgrade. Along with 1 or 2TB of storage so you can at least give your VM's 128GB or 256GB virtual disks assuming you want to use Windows. Linux lets you get away with smaller provisioning.

[LIGISTX]

13 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

If you need to run full VMs your biggest limiter is going to be those 16GB of RAM and 512 SSD. It's not very much.

 

You can use what's called a Ballooning Device which helps PROXMOX dynamically allocate RAM to VMs as needed but you're going to need to make very small storage disks if you only have 512 to play with.

You can run a lot of homelab on that…

 

I have over a dozen VM’s, and over a dozen docker containers running on under 150GB of boot drive space. RAM, depending on what the OP wants, should be fine. Ubuntu server VM’s can run perfectly fine on 1 gb of RAM for example, and as you mention LXC’s are even less overhead. 

[Windows7ge]

8 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

You can run a lot of homelab on that…

 

I have over a dozen VM’s, and over a dozen docker containers running on under 150GB of boot drive space. RAM, depending on what the OP wants, should be fine. Ubuntu server VM’s can run perfectly fine on 1 gb of RAM for example, and as you mention LXC’s are even less overhead. 

If he wants to run full Linux or UNIX like VM's yes he can really stretch this out without too much issue. My assumption was that he probably wants a couple Windows VMs which will eat that up pretty quick unless he's got something like Windows IoT for embedded devices with very little RAM and storage requirements.

[Needfuldoer]

If you want a bunch of RAM for cheap, without making a ton of noise, an OEM workstation with an LGA2066 or LGA2011-3 socket is tough to beat. Servers from that era are reaching end of life in production datacenters, so the used market is getting flooded with parts from that era at very affordable prices.

 

An HP Z440 (LGA2011-3, Haswell/Broadwell) or Dell Precision 5820 (LGA2066, Skylake and Cascade Lake) chassis can be had for a couple hundred bucks if you shop around, then you can throw in a high core count processor and RAM that costs around a buck per gig.

 

Or if you absolutely must have newer hardware, go for a Ryzen 3900X AM4 build. They're much faster per-core than the older stuff, and they'll take 128 GB of RAM, but naturally they'll cost more.