Homelab - just a HDD away

Setting up a homelab doesn't require much.

A second hard drive in a PC is enough to start.

After realizing that magnetic HDDs were good enough for our ancestors' servers, I decided to just start with what I have available rather than waiting for the day I'm able to afford my dream - SSD only, dual CPU - server(-farm).
A 1TB HDD in my primary workstation will do - since it will do all the hard work, any notebook will do for administration.

A homlab doesn't even require a physical network since most of today's infrastructure is virtualized anyway.

Start small and scale when needed is an important strategy to learn too.

Surely, the required hardware does depend on the goal, but a single (decent) PC will work in most cases.

Even an unoptimized Ubuntu VM will work great with only 1GB RAM/10GB HDD

and, as long not all VMs are running at 100%, it's totally possible to overprovision the virtual infrastructure(which means the VM could use 1GB RAM - but all unused RAM is available to the other VMs as well).

My main goal is to check out DevOps related tools and get a feeling of how much work it is to set up a proper infrastructure all by myself. It's much easier to test certain strategies - like load balancing - when a working infrastructure is just a boot away.

So, lets get started - the first boot is just a matter of a few screws👏

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