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How do I get started in homelab/homeserver?

Hardware

Overall Base Machine:

  • You do not need any special hardware to begin your home server / homelab journey. A lot of us have special hardware. A lot of us will even claim that we need it. But the truth is that you do not need anything special.
  • You can use a old PC or laptop you have laying around. A direct non Wifi network connection is best but that doesn't mean you can't make that work either.
  • My personal favorite is used CSE 826 and CSE 847 units. You can get a 12 x 3.5" SATA chasis for $200-400 with an x10drh-it rails and everything included depending on market. These are big, make noise, heat, and use a lot of electricity. But I love them. Be weary if you get it in your head you want to do this. You might not be as crazy as me.
  • Also mini PCs are popular like ProDesk 300s, Intel E100 mini pcs.
  • You can do a custom build. One of my nodes is a custom built Ryzen machine in a lsv-4500U rosewill case.

NIC (Network interface controller):

  • You will need a NIC installed in your machine. If you plan on doing routing (hosting a firewall or router like opnsense or pfsense) you will need more than one interface.
  • If you are gonna be doing this for awhile I recommend investing in at least 10G networking components
  • 2 x 10g x520-da2 are cheap: https://www.ebay.com/itm/126876726221
  • 4 x 10g CX3's are available too: https://www.ebay.com/itm/116656563401
  • I can't recommend anything else, anything should work good enough to learn and good luck.

HBA (Host Bus Adapter):

  • The HBA is responsible for managing storage devices, drives. If you are going to be using any SAS drives especially on consumer motherboards... You will need at least one. There are multiple versions of SAS and internal and external variants. This is not meant to be a crash course for that. Just a mention so you know its a thing to look out for
  • For learning, stick to SATA drives and your motherboard should be able to provide some SATA ports for storage; no worries.

GPU: Not necessary, but depending on what you want to run and especially if you want to use this for hosting multimedia or playing with self-hosted ai, security camera machine learning or game streaming, then you will probably want one. Generally Nvidia has the best all-around support and is the most likely to be developed for in self-hosted apps. However a lot of stuff still works on Intel and AMD.

CPU/RAM: Very convoluted to discuss. You will need them. The amount of RAM you need will be determined by how much RAM your workload needs. Can't really guess that. If you have a CPU heavy workload you might need a beefy CPU or a server with multiple CPUs, if you are not CPU heavy; having a big CPU could just raise the utility bill and make noise and heat for no reason.

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