For me personally, I built my “data centre” as cheap as possible, but there’s a few requirements that the computers you’re using would not cut it: storage server must be using ZFS with ECC. I started this around a decade ago and I only spent ~$300 at the time (reusing old PSU and case I think).
There are many requirements of a data centre that can be relaxed in a home lab settings, up time, performance, etc. but I would never trade data integrity for tiny bit of savings. Sadly this is a criteria that many, including some of those building very sophisticated home cluster, didn’t set as a priority.
It looks to me, and i could be wrong, that many “homelabbers” upgraded from hoarding dvds to hoarding docker containers or whatever.
For your home, no, you don’t need it. But if setting up a remote backup, ie at your parents / in-laws / children / summerhouse / whatever, S3 can help cut down on network traffic by offloading checksum calculations to the remote server. It won’t help (much) with backups, but verification of backups will be much faster as you don’t have to transfer everything back home to verify it like with SMB.
Yes, fully agree with this and I've a similar setup. I even started with using wsl on the default windows install hoping to switch later to linux, but didn't have much need for this. Only gripe is tailscale seems to be flaky (rare) in windows.
Better to start with something small and cheap, see if it solves your needs and then upgrade if needs. Don't overcomplicate things based on what others do.
What are you putting in the VM, another Linux kernel? Why? Yeah then you need to take into account between 4GB and ~ 8GB of extra ram per VM.
I don't have RAID though I do backup to my NAS at my parents'.
But honestly a NVMe drive is basically like a CPU: it's either dead on arrival or it will just run forever.
There are some use cases for a VM over a container, sometimes you want better isolation (my public facing webserver runs in one), or a different OS for some reason (I run an OSX VM because its the only way to test a site in Safari).
But yeah I just restrict my webserver in an unprivileged container. Though my site is static and accepts no input whatsoever.
Containers also have some advantages for device passthrough, I have my Intel iGPU added into one for Immich and Frigate, can't do that with a VM unless you detach the whole GPU from the system.
Seems like a waste to me.
Backup your docker config and your data, that's what you actually need. The rest is just available online if you ever need it.
>Besides sometimes you need to run software that is not available on linux.
Really, like what?
You don't need ECC
You absolutely don't need proxmox, containers are good enough
It does not quickly make sense to build a proper home server
Raid1 or raid6 makes sense, but it's absolutely not a tipping point.
Goals are vastly different too. For some it's about hosting a few services to be free from company slop, for others it's a way to practice devops: clustering, containers, complex networking.
Seeing someone recommending Proxmox or Freenas to a beginner that just want to share family photos from an old laptop is wrong in so many ways...
If you ask these people you need to buy expensive hardware and build your own datacenter at home.
I have been hosting all my services on a single Intel Nuc from 10 years ago and a RPI5 as backup for critical services like DNS.
That's it.
You'll truly be amazed at how much stuff you can actually run on very little hardware if you only have between 2 and 5 users like in a family.
Also, MinIO was always a enterprise option. It was never meant for home use. Just use SeaweedFS, Garage or so if you really want S3.
Sidenote: You do not need S3 in your house. Just use the filesystem.