For reasons unexplained, you have no homelab hardware, but $1,000 in cash earmarked for the purpose.
What are you buying, what are you installing on it, and how is it different from what you’ve done previously (i.e. lessons learned)?
2-3 second hand small form factor PC’s running Proxmox, cheap 2 bay Synology NAS for backups.
mini pc to run pfsense on , used managed gig switch, used dell server from ebay. Buy some decent drives with what’s left over.
get a synology nas instead of a giant enterprise server. I only boot it when i need to use it as the power consumption is so high.
I’d buy the highest memory GPU I could get my hands on and slap it in my computer. I’d be playing with AI because it’s probably going to replace us all in the not too distant future.
People are probably going to be like “wELl Ai HaLOOOsiNaTes or GetS ThiNgs WRonG”. Yep, and so do people. We also had vacuum tubes and literal bugs before we had transistors and metaphorical bugs. This isn’t a steady march to computers everywhere. This is a sprint to see who replaces all thinking work with AI agents first. The controller of the most successful agents will own the labor force.
So, either learn to build and repair the looms or become a luddite. Focus your lab money on AI.
3 optiplex 7040s micros - put 32gb ram and a 2tb ssd in each and call it a day
An am4 mobo+4500 = <150 euros. Cheap atx case + psu = 75 Leaves you 75 for ram to price-match those 7040 with lots more expandability and ecc support.
