Obligatory long time lurker, first time poster, etc. I’m not actually a sysadmin myself, I’m a network engineer, but I’ve been thinking it would be beneficial to get some sysadmin experience under my belt, and the recent posts about learning Linux and Windows server administration seemed like a good place to start.
I’m wondering if rather than buying a dedicated rack server, I could build myself a new desktop and use my current desktop as a server. It has the following hardware:
CPU: Ryzen 3950x
RAM: 128GB DDR4-3200
GPU: 2080 Ti
Misc: has 10GbE copper Ethernet
I’m thinking that the GPU could be swapped for something more power efficient since I don’t intend to use this for gaming or video processing. At most I’d want to use it as a Plex server (or a reasonably high-speed NAS for a new desktop that could act as the Plex server), and if possible dedicate some portion to an EVE-NG networking lab environment.
Would I run into any limitations using this as a learning platform? I’m fairly confident that in terms of CPU cores/threads, 16/32 and 128GB RAM would be enough room for a reasonable ecosystem, but what I don’t know is if using consumer hardware as a server gives rise to challenges or complications such that it’d be better to just shell out for a nice SuperMicro or Dell tower server or something.
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A desktop will give you a world of possible upgrades while not sounding like a constant jet engine. I have a rack at home with a dedicated room and if I wasn’t making money from it I’d downgrade to a tower in a heartbeat.
Servers usually gives you access to a management interface, ecc ram, dual/quad sockets (optional), hot-swap drives, etc. In other words it gives you tools to lower your risk of downtime. It’s usually less of an issue in a homelab so you can save money by staying with consumer grade hardware.
Let me know if you have any specifics you’d like to know about.
Even micro pcs make good home labs as they are low power and compute demands from typical “home” services are quite low. Bigger server chassis are more built to handle higher temperature settings with higher power demands and include ECC support which is essential for critical applications, but at home you can just …reboot your Plex server. It’s not as big a deal.
