I’ve been working in IT for a couple of years, primarily at a small MSP focused on the SMB market. While I’ve gained valuable experience I still have lots to learn. I’m eager to further my learning and experimentation at home. However, my “home office” is about to be repurposed as we’re expecting our second child, so space is limited.
I recently watched the “Forbidden router” and The Ultimate Home Server! series, which has inspired me to final build a home server that can also function as a firewall/router. I understand this might not be the optimal solution, but given my space constraints, it seems like the best approach. Additionally, I’m aiming for a quiet setup to help not annoy by Wife.
Here’s what I’m thinking:
Hardware:
Processor: 1st or 2nd generation AMD Epyc with at least 16 cores.
RAM: 128GB or more.
Storage:
8TB of SSDs for VMs.
4+TB in RAID for personal files (photos and documents).
12-24TB for multimedia storage (Movies/TV/Music), RAID or not.
I have a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 570 ITX 4G which can be used in this build.
Networking:
Currently have a 300/100Mb fibre connection
All devices expect my PC and this sever run over wifi
I will connect this server under the current ISP router, so if there is any issues, my family is not impacted and I will connect under the server.
I do have a IBM 49Y4242 Intel ETHERNET Quad-Port Adapter which I will be using
Software Choices:
I’m undecided between ESXi and Proxmox VE as the underlying OS for virtualization.
I do have VMware Workstation Pro on my desktop
Seeking advice on the best approach for setting up the RAID for personal photos.
General hardware recommendations for my use case.
Future Projects:
I plan to work on several projects over time, including:
WOW that is quite an impressive setup! What sort of VMs do you plan on running? Do you plan on doing big number crunching data science type stuff or do you just want a platform to play with little experiments and software instances?
It sounds like you gearing up to run your own chatGPT locally!!
I have just switched from ESXi(free license version) to proxmox for ym VMs and I can recommend both as they are both pretty easy to use for the basic stuff especially. I have gone to proxmox mainly because you can cluster and do high availability on the free license. Which brings me to my point, HARDWARE.
I picked up 3x HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Minis and have a 2Tb SSD for storage as well as a 1Tb for the OS installed in each as well as maxing out their RAM to 32Gb. I have them all setup as a cluster and they replicate each other and will do the high availability stuff if one fails.
I have unifi controller in a VM as well as a RTSP video server, a desktop VM for general use and a web server with cloudflared tunnel installed serving a website, to the web
The setup is basically silent and if all three nodes are flat out it still only uses 105 watts (35 watt max per node)
The systems are $150 each plus another few hundred for new hard SSDs and RAM. But for under $1000 you get quite a lot!
You can also add network cards (extra) via the spare m.2 slot which is for a WiFi/BT card. making them great to run pfsense/opensense(I am yet to get the hardware pass though working to run firewall software in a VM, YET!)
If you use case is non-production home lab kinda stuff then I highly recommend doing something like this.
I do also have a standalone NAS running truenas for all my data backup but it is just a i3 with ECC ram and lots of hard drives, also not very expensive and pretty light on power use.
Best of both worlds?
Hope this helps and be sure to post back with what you end up getting!!!
@TrickWalrus congratulations on your new bundle of joy. I am the oldest of 10 kids, the last sister just move out, so I get to have a home office.
I would forget about any build based on an AMD Epyc. Epyc likes airflow, so unless your wife doesn’t mind a jet engine under the house router, you can forget an Eypc build. Have you considered not giving up your home office, and having your kids share a room. I did not have my own room untill I was 13 years and then I had to share the room with my Dad. The room was his home office. If you decide to give up your home office then my advice would be go with a setup like @paws’s. I would also set up two seperate networks but share the house internet connection, so when you try and learn somthing new. You don’t take down anyone else internet connection. I learned that the hard way.
I don’t have anything specific other than what I originally mentioned in the post. Just want the flexibility to do whatever I like off a whim. My main focus for now will be around learning cyber security skills and how to defend networks. So having the resources to quickly spin up a lot of VMs and using monitoring software to collect logs would be nice etc.
Yeah i will have to give Proxmox a try before I commit, I installed ESXi free version recently and was impressed compared to Hyper-V. I thought about playing around with clustering as I can easily get access to plenty of older desktops at work, but just dont really have the appropriate amount of room for 3 acer desktops. I will probably just play around with clustering at work when I have a bit of time up my sleeve.
Hmm thanks for the advice about air flow with Epyc, definitely something that will be a little constrained on … or may I just run some data cabling to my garage … this will resolve all my constraints around noise and space.
Got a quick question for you,
is your garage attach to the house? Do you park your cars in the garage? There is a famous network Youtuber who has done just that. My only concern with using a garage to store equipment would be dust dirt, and heat. electronic equipment do not like being in a very hot area.
If you want to burn a ton of money, this is a good way to do it.
I don’t want to put a damper on your plans, but if you do not have a specific thing in mind, this build would make an adequate starter server that can handle everything you list above, and more, except for storage:
If you are still in doubt that the cores will be enough, the Ryzen 9 7900 is also an option. And if you want ECC, there is an ASUS B650 motherboard that supports ECC.
For storage, get an Asustor Flashstor 6 bay full m.2 SSD enclosure and populate it with a bunch of $180 4TB drives. It will be fast enough for most if not all tasks, 20TB with RAID5, and costs $1500 drives inclusive.
Or spend $3000+ on an EPYC, your time, your money so you do you
