What an amazing resource this is. I have built my own PC in the distant past. AMD was barely a thing and XEON was not around yet. So its been a while. I just started working as an evangelist for an identity startup a few weeks ago after being an evangelist at Datadog for 7 years. For both of those roles, having a homelab virtualization server to test out things like Kubernetes and various other solutions has been important.
At the moment I have a Proxmox box that is running on a 2012 Mac Mini (quad core i5 2.3ghz with 16gb ram and 500g hd). Its 10 years old but surprisingly capable. But when there is a 3 node k8s cluster plus homeasssistant and docker with portainer and some other vm’s along with pihole and a few other things in containers, then resources run low. I have to pause things to try new things. I use Backblaze for backups from my main home iMac but would like an additional local backup for my work M1 MBP, as well as all the other Pi’s around the house that are zigbee routers and dedicated companion/playoutbee box to provide videos and titles for streaming on the ATEM. I do a lot of videos for work, so have a lot of massive video files to backup and constantly access. And transferring those big files means 10Gb Ethernet is strongly preferred over 1Gb.
I don’t have a dedicated server room/closet for now, though maybe in a year or so. I do have a closet off the main hall but it isn’t very well sealed off. So anything I get needs to be quiet. The house is pretty new, so cat6a or 7 goes to all the rooms and many rooms have 2 runs, about 40 runs in all. All of those cables lead to that closet. They actually led to a super inconvenient space above the pantry. The original owners who built the house would never touch the gear and never expected someone like me to buy the house from them. Pulling out a ladder every time I need to do something up there sucks. The closet is next to the pantry and under that space. So there is a rack in the closet with Omada networking gear (5 Omada access points around the house too) with fans swapped out to be Noctuas. The Mac mini is there along with some of the Lutron RadioRA2 gear. The house is very efficient, so having a more power efficient server would be consistent with the house. Also the closet is about 28" deep. So I would probably need a shallower enclosure for the server assuming that I actually want to plug it in. I see there are some Chenbro rack cases that are only 17" deep so that is good.
OK, so enough background. What is it I want? I want a quiet rack mounted (4u is fine) virtualization and storage server. Budget? Let’s say up to 4k all in. 2k would be better. 5k stretch. Oh, I am based near Seattle so its all USD. Want to be able handle my current vm workload times three or more. More means keeping this going for longer so that’s good. Storage? I am now at about 8TB on backblaze and that’s from a single machine. 32TB should be safe for a good long time. Room to grow would be helpful. Not sure if I will use Proxmox or TrueNAS Scale (its shiny and new). I think that is everything you need. I wish I could provide more direction, but really don’t know more.
Supermicro are my preferred choices as we use them at work (I think even Linus has them in a few videos).
However, gold or better PSU would be preferred.