As part of my new initiative to learn Linux and VMWare Administration, I started looking at what it would take to put together a homelab server. There’s just one minor complication. I live in an apartment and don’t have an office where I can put a rack. In fact, my PC, cable modem and router is in the living room. Not exactly prime real estate for throwing a lack rack or anything due to size, heat and noise.
I started looking at microservers instead.
First I found this one, the HP Proliant G7/G8.
After looking at a few hardware specs and prices it became clear that the Proliant was waaaay underpowered and overpriced. It’s small, but that was it’s only good selling point. As a baremetal server for doing nested virtualization, it was completely unsuitable due to the slow processor and low RAM maximum. The price was also ridiculous for what you got, at well over $1000.
I asked the VMWare channel in RouterGods what they recommended, and I was pointed at the Intel NUC by Steve over at www.densemode.com.
This was way more on target. Small, quiet, but packing a maximum 32GB of ram and an Intel Core i7-8650U processor with 4 cores and 8 threads @ 1.9GHz, this box could support nested virtualization and several VMs. It was a little weaker than I was aiming for but it fit the exact profile I wanted: small, quiet, low heat, and enough punch to set up with VMWare or as a baremetal server with Ubuntu. This particular NUC, loaded with 32GB of RAM and a 512MB M.2 SSD priced just over $1200.
Steve also suggested that if I was looking for something punchier, I look at the Dell T7610 desktop workstation.
This was definitely a monster server that fit the lower space profile. Sporting dual Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 2.8GHz 10-Core CPU, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD drive, I could do just about anything with it from a virtualization perspective. My only concerns were the heat output and noise (the size was fine as a mid-tower). I couldn’t find any specs around noise level, so I decided that the T7610 might be a bridge too far until I can buy a house and dedicate office space to it.
Right now, I’m thinking I may go with the NUC for home, and see if there is rack space available at work to do a small UCS, like the C220 or something similarly sized. For people in an apartment without dedicated office space, it may be very difficult to land on a server which has the punchiness required while also not driving the family mad with noise/heat output.
Have you done similar research, and if so, what did you end up going with?
