I am looking to finally put together a dedicated home lab for self study in managing virtual infrastructure, containers, AI and ML as well as perform general home server duties (maybe even a forbidden router).
I was thinking about building around the Intel W LGA4677 series in a Thermaltake Core W200 Super Tower Chassis for a two in one case for future workstation/gaming PC build.
So far the only components I actually have and would like to use are:
6 x Intel Optane 905P Series 960GB U.2
2 x Intel SSDPEK1A118GA01 Optane P1600X 118 GB Solid State Drive - M.2 2280
I was looking to run Proxmox as the hypervisor on a mirrored array on the two Optane P1600X M.2 drives and then run a tiered storage pool with the Optane 905P drivers and some cheap flash storage (would like to stay away from the spinning rust).
What I am looking to actually do on the server is labbing Windows domains (simple domains, inter domain trusts and Intune/SCCM and other hydration kids so the ability to do nested VM’s is critical. On the Linux side of things I will be looking at working with Ansible to do IaC as well as labbing integrating Linux into a Windows environment to build skills around what might be typically found in a modern network.
For the container side of things I have never touched containers before so I am looking to go from setting up a simple container to run a media server or the like to then progress into full container orchestration for scaling etc.
As for AI and ML I don’t even really know where to start with these two so the ability to start from zero with a “good enough to get you going” setup is all I really need for this.
What I have come up with so far is this
Intel XEON W5-2445
ASRock W790 WS
4x Kingston 64GB ECC Registered DDR5 4800 (PC5 38400) Memory
Thermaltake Core W200
Noctua NH-U14S DX-4677
FSP Twins Pro ATX PS2 1+1 Dual Module 900W 80 PLUS GOLD
Plus the following which I already have
6 x Intel Optane 905P Series 960GB U.2
2 x Intel SSDPEK1A118GA01 Optane P1600X 118 GB Solid State Drive - M.2 2280
And looking at either an AMD Radeon Instinct MI25 or MI50 from ebay
None of the above (other than the Optane which I already own) is set in stone so any feedback on suggested alternatives is appreciated.