Hi all,
Long time listener, watcher lurker, first time poster. Apologies if I’m in the wrong section or if this has been asked to death.
I’m about to hopefully take the plunge into self hosting, I’m thinking small scale currently. Hoping to use VMs / containers for the followinh:
some self storage (cloud) for 2 users max
Plex media server
Pihole (currently have one running on a pi)
Also would like to have a play around with radarr and sonarr and other rrs.
I’ve found a hp proliant microserver gen 10 locally for about 100 euros, 8gb ram (unsure exactly what cpu) and 1 1tb Hdd, (I know I’ll have to add storage) it’s got 4 drive bays total.
it seems reasonably speced, but I’m just unsure if it’s too old, or if I can install promox and the like on it?
I’d say that’s a good starting point to experience home-lab’ing first hand. Use the system as-is for a while before spending a ton of money on it to see if you like having a server on 24/7. Watch your power bills, utilise IPMI or other onboard remote management to power the server on and off if running 24/7 isn’t sustainable for whatever reason. Mind, these servers make quite a racket, so either have good sound isolation or learn how to use IPMI from the outset.
Once you’re OK with having a server running, upgrade the HDD to an SSD, a 1TB drive will set you back around €60-ish on Aliexpress. For a 2TB SSD, expect some 110-120€. Note, you’ll need SATA SSD’s, NVMe drives can be cheaper for the same capacity but are likely not compatible with the drive trays. Your next upgrade is to find suitable RAM to expand/replace the current 8GB in it. It’s likely you’ll need ECC RAM, I’m not sure if that’ll be DDR3 or DDR4. Not expensive, but not an expense to spend ahead of time (i.e. finding out you really need that server in the first place).
As for the OS: Proxmox and TrueNAS Scale will be fine, a box-standard Linux install will do too, but that leaves you w/o a nice GUI to watch and control your server with.
I was worried I’d get sarcastic “what a stupid question” replies.
Sorry I should have also included I’m not a completely hardware noob, I have a few other drives kicking around I could chuck onto it I guess and then if I’m liking what I’m seeing I cam upgrade to newer high cap ones.
With a recent solar panel install I’m not overly worried about the power draw I think it’ll take about20 - 25 watts at idle and 30 or a bit more “under load”
The mobo has 1 empty ram slot as standard so 1 8gb stick will bring me up to 16gb which will prob one one of the first upgrades.
But the above isn’t to say I shouldn’t learn ip I! No point having a media server online at 3am when no one is awake to watch the stuff!!
I’d been hoping to score a synology NAS but for my budget (basically nothing) I’ve only seen 10+ year old ones with god awful ram amounts,
I’ll think I’ll make an offer on this guys gen 10.
Thanks a mill!
Not a fan of HP, at all. May be fine for first learning and “fool about with” box, I do not trust them.
Since you are looking at low user count, anything may work, but:
Get a power-meter of some kind, plug your hobby-stuff in there, have a look at it. 300W may sound okay for a while, small island-solar-systems are cheap enough to offset hobby-servers (and their own cost) somewhat quickly though.
Edit: Nevermind the solar
For context, my 3 SBCs and hodge-podge NAS with Switch and Router are sipping 80-ish Watts.
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