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.

  • @RotaryKeyboardEnglish
    1•7 months ago

    My homelab started with a Synology NAS as well. At first I put a few VMs on the NAS, and then I expanded the homelab to include a single PC. I almost bought a NUC instead. I’m glad I didn’t, because the NUC only offered one advantage: it was small. Beyond that, the PC was better in every respect. More expandable, more configurable, etc. I decided to get a really small PC case intended for home theater PCs to get some of the smallness offered by the NUC and called it good.