Home Lab build

[xInfluX]

Looking to build a test/study lab for various VMs, servers, practice with Microsoft server 12 and 16, hyper v and practicing powershell scripts on. Just something I want to keep in the house to learn on. Dont want to spend a ton of money. I'd like it to be as cheap as possible and I'm okay with ebay parts. Thanks

 

[asoroka]

Yes.

Focus on as much memory as you can, so at lease 32GB and as many cores as you can.

Compare a new AMD 2600 in terms of what you can get from eBay. The price differential will not be that great.

Also consider using esxi as a bare metal hypervisor rather than Hyper-V. (You can always run win16 Hyper-V as a VM anyway).

Look for sellers that have a returns policy for DOA items.

 

[stdragon]

At minimum, go with 16GB of RAM if you only planning on running two concurrent VMs with 4GB of RAM allocated to each of them. The more RAM, the better; so definitely look toward 32GB if you can.

You'll want at least a four core CPU, two network ports, and ideally an SSD. Again, depends on how many VM and of what content, but a 256GB to 512GB SSD should suffice. You'll be creating dynamic VHDs, so it should be plenty of space.

 

[xInfluX]

So minimum quad core CPU, as much ram as possible. An ssd for the OS and VM stuff. A couple of tb hdd and that should do? What kind of mobo and power supply should I be looking for?

 

[asoroka]

Any Motherboard that suits your CPU.

I like Asus or Gigabyte, but everyone has their favourites.

PSU around 350W to 500W, but don't scrimp, get good Gold rated 500W.