[ovirt-users] oVirt home lab hardware

[Jamie Lawrence]

I'm a bit out of date on the topic, but unless they have changed, avoid the NUCs. I bought a couple but gave up on them because of a firmware bug (? limitation, at least) that Intel said it won't fix. It causes a lockup on boot if a monitor is not connected. I've been told that different models don't have that problem, but have also heard of other weird problems. The impression I got is that they were meant for being media servers stuck to the back of TVs, and other use cases tend to be precluded by unexpected limitations, bugs and general strange behavior. Perhaps this was fixed, but I ended up with a bad taste in my mouth.

You can pick up dirt-cheap rackmount kit on Ebay. A few R710s or similar can be had for a few $hundred and would be absolutely lovely overkill for a home network. The downside of this approach at home is going to be power consumption and noise, depending on local energy costs and the nature of your dwelling. Also, some people may not be that fond of the datacenter look for home decor.

Unless you live in a cheap energy locale/don't pay for your power/enjoy malformed space heaters, don't underestimate the cost of running server kit. Getting rid of rack mount machines and switches and moving everything to a couple machines built with energy consumption in mind cut my electricity costs by over half.

-j


> On Jan 18, 2018, at 12:52 PM, Abdurrahman A. Ibrahim <a.rahman.attia at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am planning to buy home lab hardware to be used by oVirt.
> 
> Any recommendations for used hardware i can buy from eBay for example? 
> Also, have you tried oVirt on Intel NUC or any other SMB servers before?