Recently I started creating my projects, and they vary a lot. They're Kubernetes cluster, pihole, vulnerable machines to hack, web servers, home automation, cracking stations, etc.
Even though I have experience using the cloud, I have yet to build my home lab. I am considering buying a Raspberry or a MiniPC to get started.
Any tips and councils on how I should start?
Buy a labeling machine and label everything that is not known good. If you have SD cards, label cases explaining what is on them.
Get a large HDD in your desktop PC (or some kind of mass storage) and back up pics, notes, code, etc. Keep it forever. Keep at least 2 copies of it.
Buy plenty of plastic drawers. https://www.google.com/search?q=plastic+drawers Label them with the labeling machine (1" black text on white labels work the best. If the labels do not stick, stick duct tape to the drawer and stick the label to the duct tape.) Organize every part in plastic drawers.
Then pick another project and get it done.
Don't give in to the temptation to rack-mount everything or to build hardware for possible future use. Just do one project at a time.
If you wanna scale up, you could re-use the Dell T20 as NAS only device and buy a more powerful server hardware.
You could also get one of these lenovo mini devices as a server, but I invested some more money and got myself a still cheap but very power efficent Fujitsu D3417-B2 Board about 9W idle.
See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MucGkPUMjNo
As Software / OS you could start with TrueNAS Scale or Proxmox.
- Got a couple of Raspberry Pi's and connected them to wifi.
- Installed https://k3s.io/ on them. One master node and one agent/worker.
- Started adding workloads
- Now I have PiHole, Tailscale, Promtheus, Grafana, Mimir, Homebridge, a custom Go app that I use to create a bunch of metrics, eg. from my solar power system, etc.
- Also added another agent/worker over time.
- cheap
- come with an integrated UPS
- come with an integrated console for debugging (keyboard/screen)
- usually more efficient hardware than a desktop, and certainly a server
- quietSomeone mentioned "r/homelab", which is pretty interesting/active if you can stomach Reddit.
VMware has a 'free' ESXi license for homelabs (no cost, many restrictions apply). It'll run on many/most of the small PCs out of the box; 7.0 ran perfectly on my Seeed Odessey. Yeah, I need to spend more time with the various newfangled OSS hypervisors, but I'm used to ESXi. Get off my lawn.
I personally think having a managed ethernet switch, particularly one you can do VLANs and netflow and/or port mirroring is helpful in a homelab. VLANs help you build more complex scenarios, and sometimes you really want more visibility about what's going on on the wire. Refurb Cisco or Dell switches work well (and tend to be very cheap), but also tend to be noisy and power inefficient. I don't have a ton of experience with the newer generation of probably more efficient 'desktop' smart switches like Zyxel, TP-Link and Ubiquity.
They still look kinda neat, but if you really want to run your "home lab" at "home", I think you're better off getting an SFD or similar and running VirtualBox
Personally ... I don't want more stuff running in my house, and prefer to pay someone else a couple bucks for the server to run in their datacenter :)
(Of course ... that's probably not gonna work if you're wanting to "do something cool" with other data/systems you have at home)
You can find great deals on powerful PCs from eBay sellers who are IT recyclers.
I’ve found the SFF/Mini PC’s to be great.
You also have to decide what you want to do. And if you want the headache.
For example it’s easy to start doing home automation, dns server, NAS. When things break or updates break things and nothing is working and you have to pull it all apart again was to much for me.