homelab How many builds does one man need? (Homelab plans)

[FlufflePotKins]

I'm going to apologise for the amount of stuff going in here, but I've come up with so many ideas and I'm pretty wet behind the ears with this kind of stuff so not really sure which of these ideas are completely ridiculous. Mostly looking to build the beginnings of a homelab but also want to keep a main gaming pc/workstation.

 

Going to prefix this by saying that I'm in the UK (so stuff in £ if possible) and can't seem to find much 2nd hand server hardware, although I'd love to be proved wrong. I would give a budget but there isn't a set budget really, obviously I want to get the best for the cash but not really thinking in terms of specifics..

 

Stuff I currently have;

• AMD Phenom II x6 1055 build w/ GTX 970 Strix - Speccy
• AMD A6-6400K APU
• Dell PowerEdge 6950 (managed to grab it from work after it was replaced, haven't managed to boot it up and see what i'm playing with but do know it has 4 opterons and 32gb ecc drr2)
• GTX 660

Stuff I'm wanting to do; (ordered most important to least)

• Main gaming desktop (probably won't be used for anything more demanding than games)
• NAS server (Undecided on software yet, was thinking unRaid looked cool but would probably want to run multiple add-ins no matter what I go for)
• Software router/firewall (Pfsense and Sophos maybe)
• Media PC (Plex, Kodi etc. + Light games?)
• Virtualisation host for any temp VM stuff I want to test or any game servers such as Minecraft (Likely running ESXI)
• Mythbuntu DVR software - (front and backend can be on the same box and can use a USB 3.0 I/O expander or some shit to connect it to the TV)

 

Now that's out of the way, I've been brainstorming various ways in which to implement all of this and ideally would like to limit the number of boxes I have, and whilst money isn't the biggest factor as I'm happy to expand and build as I get the cash I don't want to throw money into something that would be too overkill.

 

The most 'fun' way I've thought of implementing this so far is to have my main desktop running a Skylake Xeon (although might have to wait for good MoBo support) and have a VM for the NAS and a VM for Windows. I'm thinking the best way to do this would be to run unRaid with the Plex plugin and then running my main desktop in a VM with GPU pass-through (Mostly inspired by the video on the channel). For the VM host, I'll probably use the Dell PowerEdge as I don't particularly want to leave it running 24/7 as I'm imagining it'll be quite loud and hot, and use a fair amount of power.

 

For the network stuff and media PC, I was thinking I could use the Phenom II x6 and GTX 660 to run the router and firewall in VM's (I know it's a security risk but not really planning on being the target for an attack). Then also running something like SteamOS or other Linux distro for light games and emulators.

 

Obviously this seams pretty convoluted (and trust me, it is) and I would love to build a seperate NAS and VM host with some old Xeons but I'm having trouble finding compatible hardware (mostly Mobo's that aren't proprietary for HP or Dell servers, or that aren't £300 supermicro boards for a pair of processors that are £40) so any suggestions there would be greatly appreciated. I also acknowledge that I could by an older pre-built server but I run into the same problem I have with the PowerEdge in that they're likely to be loud and hot (and proprietary hardware which would be near impossible to upgrade in the future.)

 

I guess my main question is how can I make this hurt my head and wallet less.... I think I'm too far into this to actually look at it reasonably now and I'm lost in a world full of virtual machines and Xeons.

 

Send help. I spent 2 hours writing this.

[Bananasplit_00]

• NAS server (Undecided on software yet, was thinking unRaid looked cool but would probably want to run multiple add-ins no matter what I go for)
• Software router/firewall (Pfsense and Sophos maybe)
• Media PC (Plex, Kodi etc. + Light games?)

this can be one PC and VMs can go on your main desktop  thats the best way i can see it. 

[FlufflePotKins]

Hey, thanks for the advice.

 

That was mostly the original plan but I was struggling to find some older Xeons that had readily available motherboards and I don't really feel like shelling out for the newer stuff given how little compute power it will actually need. That said, do you know if there's a significant disadvantage when using AMD chips for virtualization over Intel? As I could use the Phenom chip and board if I upgrade my main desktop to Skylake or something similar.