Hi,

I need help with my first homelab hardware. Maybe you experts can help me with that. I looked at this tutorial about building your own Openshift one node cluster using an Intel NUC, though I’m unsure, if I really should buy one of these.

I have set a budget of 1000€ (I’m located in germany). The tutorial suggests the Intel NUC10i7FNK, which I can get for 450€ new here (would buy 64GB RAM and a 2TB M.2 SSD for that). And I would follow the tutorial in getting a dedicated router for my lab environment.

Can I get more for my money (also in terms of upgradability) with some other product? Or should I just get that suggested NUC? I don’t need it to be that small (can be a tower), but I don’t want real server hardware, since the lab will run in my home office.

Thanks in advance for your help. My brain hurts from comparing products, searching for their availability, etc.

EDIT:

I’ve now decided to buy the NUC10i7FNK. It seems to be a sensible choice and the tutorial says, that it has enough beef for my first goal of building my own Openshift cluster for experimenting.

Thanks to all of you! You helped me to get to a good decision in this wide field of home lab equipment.

  • lucullusOPEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Ok, that sounds like a solid recommendation for the NUC. I think I can live without IPMI, especially since this is the start of my homelab (besides my RaspberryPis)

    I’ve heard a lot about proxmox and I will definitely try it out before any other solution. Running VMs and containers side by side is a great plus.

    At this point I haven’t really looked at the router-with-custom-firmware game. I heard about openWRT and OPNsense, but I definitely need to do some research on that. Interesting site, though it looks terrible on mobile.

    Thanks for your recommendations