I think there’s a spectrum and you said it as if there’s only two sides.

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.

Press X to doubt. I also use 150$ NUC for over a decade at home. At first it was ext4 then xfs, without ECC memory..

It looks to me, and i could be wrong, that many “homelabbers” upgraded from hoarding dvds to hoarding docker containers or whatever.

> You do not need S3 in your house. Just use the filesystem.

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.

> 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.

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.

A powerful enough machine (usually limited by RAM, not CPU) will let you run a hypervisor OS like Proxmox which helps a lot with making things secure and flexible. You might also want to have RAID, ECC memory. It quickly starts to make sense to build a proper home server rather than cobbling together a bunch of low end hardware. The tipping point is probably when you want more than 1-2 hard drives worth of storage.

If you run everything on Linux you don't need VMs.

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.

The average Linux VM I run is around 50-100MB of RAM usage. Not actually that much more than an LXC container.

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).

Ok that is a very low usage. Alpine or so?

But yeah I just restrict my webserver in an unprivileged container. Though my site is static and accepts no input whatsoever.

Just a basic Debian install.

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.

Backing up entire VMs with all the configuration in case an update breaks something or just bricks your server is a smart idea aswell as running stuff in containers. Also, 4GB per VM? Besides sometimes you need to run software that is not avaliable on linux.

If you backup the entire VM you are just backing up the Linux kernel itself and all the (GNU) tools with it.

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?

Good backup software deduplicates on storage. Proxmox backup server for example.

Not all server executables for video games are avaliable on linux for example. There is a lot of use cases and just saying "you just need X" is somewhat of an ignorant statement. No, I don't.

I'm also going to leave my personal opinion;

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.

Man, "homelab" is such a wide term. For some it's an old Android, for some it's a literal datacenter in a basement. And everything in between.

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...

I used to be on the side of single NUC, but when my self hosted services became important enough, I realized I need to take security and reliability seriously, you know, all the SysAdmin/SRE stuff, and that's when I started moving to "that side".