A journey to my homelab…
Let expose the problem, I need a homelab, of course on budget. My wife won’t let me spend 5000$ in hardware just for house heating. First talk with my friend: “Ah you need a good NAS and a NUC!”. Ok, so the NAS have no CPU power but the NUC have it, the NUC does not have enough disks space but the NAS have it. What about playing with cluster technologies ? “Oh, then install proxmox!”, Yep. but what the purpose to do virtualisation when there is no redondancy ? So, Let’s find out, if there is not another setup possible which will be more or less at the same price!
First the hardware
Let’s study three possible setup with a rough estimation about costs:
| Setup | Components | Approximate Price |
|---|---|---|
| NAS + NUC | NAS (e.g., Synology DS220+) | $300 |
| NUC (e.g., Intel NUC 11) | $400 | |
| 2x HDD - 2TB | $200 ($100 each) | |
| Total | $900 | |
| —————— | ———————————– | ——————- |
| Raspberry Pi | 3x Raspberry Pi 5 - 16Gb RAM | $450 ($150 each) |
| 3x Hat GeeekPi P33 M.2 NVME + POE | $120 ($40 each) | |
| 3x NVME M2 500GB | $120 ($40 each) | |
| 3x SD cards - 64Gb | $40 | |
| Switch POE - 1Gb / 8 ports | $50 | |
| Others (Case, cables, etc ) | $40 | |
| Total | $820 | |
| —————— | ———————————– | ——————- |
| 3 mini PCs | 3 x Mini PC (e.g., HP mini G4 i5) | $420 ($140 each) |
| 3 x 32GB RAM | $150 ($50 each) | |
| 3 x NVME 500GB | $120 ($40 each) | |
| Switch - 1Gb / 8 ports | $30 | |
| Others (Case, cables, etc ) | $40 | |
| Total | $760 |
I repeat but the table above is a rough estimation and about the 3 mini pc, I am talking about second hand pc bought on Ebay. But as you can see, there is not a big difference in the price. And you could for other more performant PC like core i7 or more recent HP mini G5.
About the “NAS + NUC” option:
- Pros: * low-power * Compact
- Cons: * Not modular * No High Availibity
About the “Raspberry Pi” option:
- Pros: * low-power * Compact * High Availibity * Modular and extensible
- Cons: * Limited resources
About the “3 mini PCs” option:
- Pros: * low-power * High Availibity * Modular and extensible * More CPU/RAM available * The less expensive option
- Cons: * Take a bit more space * Cable management a bit more tricky
Forth options would be with real servers bare-metal, if you have access to cheap energy and have the budget for it, go for it… In the article, we will not dig into this option. But my point here is the “3 mini PCs” option can be much fun option and not so costly for a homelab.
What would I install on it…
A kubernetes of course but which one k3s, rke2, OKD… for now, it’s hard to say. My first though was k3s since there is so many example already out there, well documented like Picluster or Khue’s Homelab. K3s is lightweight but what I see usually is that you add stuff on it like cilium, ingress-nginx, etc. at the end, they were building a rke2… That’s why I went directly to rke2 with an Ansible Collection to deploy it with some customizations. The project named Rkub.
OKD/Openshift also have is homelab but not on bare-metal, mostly KVM or Proxmox like this one or this one. So in parallel, I also started a Terraform project to deploy OKD, named Okub.
Let’s see where I will arrive with those projects…
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