Buying the Hardware

When we decided to build our own self-hosted infrastructure, the first question was: what hardware do we need?

The Requirements

We needed a platform that could run a full Kubernetes cluster with multiple services. The key requirements were:

• Redundancy: At least two physical hosts
• Performance: Enough CPU and RAM for 30+ containers
• Storage: Fast local disks for databases plus a NAS for bulk data
• Low power: Energy efficiency for 24/7 operation
• Quiet: Home office, not a datacenter

What We Chose

We settled on two compact mini-PCs with AMD Ryzen processors. Each host runs Proxmox as the hypervisor, with K3s Kubernetes VMs on top. A Synology NAS handles shared storage via NFS.

The Setup

Each server has:

• AMD Ryzen processor with integrated GPU
• 32 GB DDR5 RAM
• 500 GB NVMe SSD for the OS
• 500 GB dedicated SSD for Longhorn block storage

The Synology NAS provides 4 TB of shared storage for media, backups, and NFS volumes.

Next Up

In future posts, we will cover the software stack: Proxmox, K3s, ArgoCD, and all the self-hosted applications.

Man must explore, and this is exploration at its greatest Buying the Hardware