I dusted off my RPI4 and started tinkering with self-hosting things and it’s sparked a fire. Suddenly I have 7 docker containers running and I need more RAM, more space and I want something reliable with room to grow. I like small form factors but it doesn’t need to be RPI small. Any recs for your favorite hardware under $500?
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Definitely a NUC or similar mini PC from the likes of Geekom, Beelink, or Minisforum. My whole homelab was mini PCs until I consolidated to a NUC 12 Pro as I build up my rack. Slap Proxmox on the machine, build some VMs and LXCs, and have at it.
I’d recommend taking a look at used small form factor PCs on eBay. I’ve been using one for a couple years now that came with an i7-8700 16GB of ram and an nvme SSD for about $300. Running 30+ docker containers without any issues (most are lightweight to be fair)
The only drawback to small form factor is that you have limited expansion opportunity with the unit itself. In my case I use an external NAS for storage of larger files.
ServeTheHome has a bunch of videos on YouTube about these small form factor computers.
That’s why instead of getting a more higher spec mini PC I went with 3 cheaper ones to start a highly available cluster. More reliable, and room for expansion! Somewhat a pain to setup though.
I have a couple of Intel NUCs and they are great, one is the first generation NUC with the Celeron and runs Home Assistant without problems.
At the moment I am eyeing the new N100 CPUs they are pretty powerful compared to the previous generation. Asrock and Asus are bringing out motherboards with the CPU soldered and they are also fanless. The Asrock is nicer because you don’t need a real PSU for it and it has an extra SATA port. They are not yet available.
https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/index.asp
https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/prime/prime-n100i-d-d4/
Planning on making an unRaid miniPC
NUCs are great if you can snag them on sale or for a good deal but they’re (somewhat) like Apple nowadays, paying the “NUC tax” imo. You can usually find other SFF with similar or better specs for cheaper on eBay. HP Prodesk (Mini) for example you can grab some extra RAM and a cheap SSD to max it out.
Other than a very old laptop that acts as a DC, and my NAS, I have five Lenovo M920 (i5, 64 gigs of ram, 256 gigs SSD, and 512 gigs M2) in a XCP-NG cluster.
I prefer the J4105 silver intels on mini itx boards, with 16GB RAM very solid setup.
Intel NUC. Myself I prefer Proxmox as the first layer (so I can do stuff remotelly), and Alpine Linux VM as a second layer.
This been rock stable for me for the past 1 year or so.
What specs is yours if you don’t mind me asking? I have a 10th hosting Proxmox and 11th hosting ESXi, but both at 32GB. Wondering if I should take the plunge and just upgrade them both max out at 64GB.
My specs:
- NUC10i7FNK
- Intel® Core™ i7-10710U Processor (12M Cache, up to 4.70 GHz)
- 512GB NVME SSD, I think it’s Samsung 970 pro
- 32GB of RAM, I think it’s DDR4-2666 (fastest supported)
I can’t comment on your “Wondering if I should take the plunge” as it highly depends on use-case. At home I am not very into HA as it gets ridiculously expensive (and I am not making money out of my services, such as Jellyfin, Homeassistant, adblocking DNS and so on).
Exact same setup as you except a larger NVME. Makes sense, no need to sink excessive cash into it. :)
Wow, first I’m exposed to Proxmox, looks really cool. I’m currently handling remote via Cloudflare Tunnels and it’s working well but I’d love something that will manage multiple servers in the future and this looks like the ticket.
Well, this is not what I meant “remotelly” 😂. I realised I am too lazy to setup monitoring (Telegraf/VictoriaMetrics/Grafana) so I look into VM metrics in proxmox. Also I can reinstall VM remotelly if I fuck things up - very convenient.
You can get some decent enterprise hardware for fairly cheap on places like amazon. I got a dell R710 for around $800 a couple of years back. The equipment tends to be a little scuffed up and older in terms of hardware, but they still offer plently of performance IMO. The one I have has a 6 drive RAID with 1.5TB disks, dual 6-core processors, and 128GB of ram. Only downside I would say is they tend to use quite a bit of power (around 207W from what I’ve measured).
I use a Dell Micro with Ubuntu for docker containers mounted to a wall with a Synology NAS 4 bay for storage. I used to have a small form factor with a 12bay SAS array attached but the power consumption was ridiculous.
At the moment hardware is just expensive. I ended up with a NUC with 32gb of ram in order to future proof myself while I wait for hardware to become cheaper. Other than another stick of ram I can’t see me needing to update any time soon.
