G+_Francis Kindred Posted August 12, 2018 Share Posted August 12, 2018 Has anyone done a home lab using an Intel NUC vs Dell Optiplex for virtualization. Right now i'm in the process of building my lab. Can anyone share their experiences on what they should/should not do? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Ben Reese Posted August 12, 2018 Share Posted August 12, 2018 My 2¢... The processor, RAM, storage are more important than the shell they're in. If you can get by with the storage restriction of a NUC, the small form factor would be nice. If need more local storage, a regular desktop/tower would probably be necessary. My "home lab" is my desktop PC with an i5 and 16 GB RAM. Most of my life is spent inside Windows, so that's running on bare metal with VMs on top using Virtual Box. If more storage is needed for the VM, I can setup an iSCSI LUN on Synology DSM. With this setup, I definitely could get by with an Intel NUC + NAS. Hope that helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Travis Hershberger Posted August 12, 2018 Share Posted August 12, 2018 The shell everything is wrapped in doesn't matter at all. As long as either one has enough cpu and ram. Storage is one of the easiest things to come by, so even a NUC call have adequate internal storage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Francis Kindred Posted August 13, 2018 Author Share Posted August 13, 2018 Thanks Travis Hershberger and Ben Reese for the comments. Small form factor is nice but not really essential. I'm leaving this in the basement. I have been looking at this dell.com - Inspiron Small Desktop It seems like an awesome deal but I'm so out of the hardware game. Specs: 8th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-8400 processor (9MB Cache, up to 4.0 GHz) 8 gig DDR4 ram, 1 TB HD. One thing the NUC also shines is the small draw on power. Right now possible use cases for this system, is installing Xen or ESXI and trying to spawn VMs. although I can just spawn VMs on top of the windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Travis Hershberger Posted August 13, 2018 Share Posted August 13, 2018 Francis Kindred I'd recommend going with xcp-ng.org - XCP-ng – XenServer based, Community Powered. instead of XenServer, and Xen itself kinda sucks till you add lots of management layers on top of it. I realize you most likely meant XenServer, but it is two different things. Than XCP-NG project is XenServer with all the features re-enabled that Citrix pulled out of their free offering. Xen is still the open-source virtulization platform that actually runs both of those. ESXi and XenServer/XCP-NG should run fine with an i5 and 8GB of ram. The amount of ram would probably limit the amount of things you could do, but something like Fedora Server (no gui) can easily run with 512MB of ram. So depending on what you want you're experimenting with, you could still do a lot more than many people would assume. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Francis Kindred Posted August 13, 2018 Author Share Posted August 13, 2018 Travis Hershberger thanks, thoughts on Dell Inspiron spec for virtualization? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Travis Hershberger Posted August 13, 2018 Share Posted August 13, 2018 I'd normally go with a used or scratch'n'dent server from xbyte.com - Home page or stikc.com. That said, the only difference that matters between the Inspiron and NUC is the amount of memory you could add. Either one should work ok for getting a home lab started. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts