The (almost) perfect Home Lab

A lot of my colleagues have a home lab for passion and for necessity. They use it to study and test the products they provide consulting services for. The problem has always been finding hardware that is small enough, aesthetically pleasing, and “well-behaved” in terms of noise and power consumption.

Many have turned to NUCs or similar devices, which often look something like this (pretty tidy):

not bad

At the VMware Explore in Barcelona and the VMUGIT UserCon in Milan, I saw a new product that would be perfect: compact, contained in a box that is also easily portable. It’s also designed for testing vSAN, with a special “blade” that acts as a witness. It’s called Dell PowerEdge XR4000

https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/poweredge-xr4000-compute-optimized-for-the-edge/

imagine a small M1000…

Unfortunately, the bitter surprise is that this beautiful machine is absolutely unaffordable for a private individual.

And sadly, we’re back to browsing aimlessly on Amazon’s Black Friday minicomputer deals.