My homelab has seen many iterations over the years. From janky old computers, Raspberry Pi clusters, dedicated servers to professionally hosted servers, I’ve tried most things related to homelab hardware and design.
This is my general guidance for new folks that might want to build a sweet homelab for their own use.
Assess Your Homelab’s Current & Future Needs
In the early days of my homelab experience, it made the most sense to use “old” computers as the foundation for my homelab. When I upgraded my “main rig” (or, primary computer), my old hardware was dedicated to “server” applications.
This is great for the early homelabber as it allows you to start down the path with minimal investment.
In the “old days” of homelabs, this was sometimes problematic as that older hardware was often a generation or five behind current technology. Modern computer hardware is less problematic in this regard as pretty much all new-ish hardware is quite capable.
That said, finding parts to add more RAM, storage or what have you was sometimes difficult due to major leaps in technology. Sometimes, outfitting this older hardware may be more expensive than it would be to buy “current generation” hardware.
But, there may come a time where your technical requirements require the implementation of current generation hardware. This is especially true when you want to get into advanced home labs, surveillance, AI analysis and other high demand home lab projects.
It’s not crazy to think you need or want current generation computer hardware. But, re-using your old hardware is an excellent way to get into home labbing!
Go With Consumer Grade Computer Hardware
We know it’s popular to try and acquire old generation server or enterprise grade hardware for the homelab. We think this is a mistake.
Enterprise grade hardware is loud and will use considerably more power than consumer grade hardware. If you’re paying your own electric bill, enterprise grade hardware is going to cost you a lot more to run over the long haul.
Buying parts for enterprise grade hardware will also cost you more. If you’re forced into things like ECC RAM, you’re going to pay a premium with very little actual benefit for the home lab.
While, sure, it’s “cool” to have some RAID 6, multi-bay, dual processor monstrosity, often times you can achieve similar capabilities with consumer grade hardware without all the challenges and extra costs.
Plus, your home life experience will be much improved if you don’t have to listen to the constant coil whine of enterprise servers. That’s fine in a data center, not so good in your home office or living room.
I switched to consumer grade hardware many years ago and still haven’t found the limits of what I can do!
Definitely Virtualize Your Hardware!
Unless you’re running ultra-low end hardware, it makes zero sense, in modern times, to run dedicated servers these days.
With open source projects like Proxmox, the home labber can virtualize their hardware and get much more value out of their home lab.
Virtualization software allows you to effectively “partition” your physical hardware. The net result is you can run a lot of different services using the same hardware.
It is absolutely worth the additional learning curve to bring in software like Proxmox. This will become evident if you have to change technical requirements (e.g. more CPU’s, more RAM, more disks) and especially when you want to branch out into future projects.
You can even consider building something like a “low end cluster” with Proxmox, which approximates the “enterprise experience” but with low end hardware. You can re-use mini-PC’s with relatively low technical capability, then distribute your home lab load across these various machines.
This lets the home labber play with things like moving virtual machines between hardware and other “cool” features that enterprise techs get to do.
RAM Is King These Days
Modern hardware is so good these days that a single, consumer grade CPU can do an incredible amount of work.
It is actually quite difficult to fully tax a modern CPU in a homelab environment. Even a CPU with a moderate 8 cores/16 threads is overkill for a lot of homelabs. Unless you’re doing homelab projects like AI analysis, surveillance and other CPU heavy processes, it’s unlikely you need more than 8 core/16 thread. Even 4 core / 8 thread CPU’s are quite viable.
If you follow my advice and virtualize your physical hardware, RAM will become your most precious resource. My current homelab server has 128 gigabytes of RAM, nearly 75% fully utilized!
RAM is the most underappreciated resource in a home lab. I’ve started to integrate this into my PC building experience, knowing that it’s quite likely my current “main rig” will fill a role as a home lab server down the road.
While a lot of RAM might be overkill for the average PC user, it’s definitely not overkill in the server and service delivery world!
Consider A Distributed Server Cluster
It has long been popular to consolidate the home lab into a single, fairly capable computer.
These days, however, Mini PC’s are quite inexpensive and come with rather capable, modern CPU hardware. They can often be outfitted with 16 or 32 gigabytes of RAM, allowing them to be fairly good workhorses in the home lab environment.
The main advantage of these mini-PC’s is they often have fairly low power requirements. While any given unit isn’t a super-cluster, you can often approximate a very capable CPU (e.g. 16 core / 32 thread) with a handful of these units.
Power consumption will typically favor the mini-PC cluster, especially considering that many home lab projects don’t demand constant access to power hungry CPU’s.
Where this cluster concept doesn’t work well is if you need concentrated CPU capabilities to a single given application. For example, surveillance is an application where you often want access to a fairly beefy CPU and it also can’t be easily distributed across multiple pieces of hardware.
Your 1 Gigabit Network Is Probably Fine
Many homelabbers get caught up in the network side of the equation. They might pursue things like 10 gigabit network connectivity and such.
For most home labs, this isn’t going to matter. As a network engineer, I can tell you that most network traffic is transient and not as demanding as you might think. 1 gigabit networks are still fully relevant and capable.
Where additional speed (such as 2.5 gigabit, 5 gigabit and 10 gigabit) really matters is sustained data transfer. Even then, unless you’re transferring data from a modern NVMe drive to another NVMe drive, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to saturate even even a 2.5gbps link.
Higher speed links will only make those sustained data transfers a little bit faster. You’re trading money for time that a computer is largely doing the work.
You’ll end up spending a lot more on your network hardware than you need to. Sure, pursue it if you must, but I’ll tell you that a 1gbps network is fine for most people!
Go Forth & Build A Killer Home Lab
I hope some of these ideas help with you defining or rebuilding your future home lab.
Should you have any questions, thoughts or other comments, feel free to slap a comment down below!