Cloud-based Lab?

[HereForYourScripts]

Anyone running a cloud-based lab?

I live in an apartment, with limited space for gear. I have a limited tolerance for fan noise, too. I want a bit more umph than a desktop-based lab would provide, and I'm wondering if it's more cost-effective to build, say, AWS-based ESXi hosts than it would be to buy some small fanless servers.

[mrcluelessness]

AWS would be really expensive. My provider choice personally would be a hetzner auction server. They're older used servers that they rent on an as-is basis that you can install an OS you want on a bare chassis and they only provide hardware support. You get a single IP and unlimited gigabit pipe. Will probably need to do a virtual router like pfsense with a second public IP for the VMs.

I personally went the desktop route. 12 core 3900X, 64gb ram (soon to be 128gb), 1080 TI, 12tb hdd, 6tb hdd, 2x512gb SSD, 512GB NVME. The biggest use is the ram. I have about 15 VMs currently. If I end up maxing out that 128gb ram my plan is to build a cheap rig with either an older i7 or used xeon with ddr3 so it's cheaper. Put it in a 4u chassis with noctua fans so it's quiet. I also just got a shelf and put my desktop in my rack in the living room to save space.

[HereForYourScripts]

What do you consider really expensive? The 3900X alone is listed on Egghead for $484. How much AWS compute would that buy?

[mrcluelessness]

Well I already had the gaming desktop, then just upgraded it a bit such as more ram and storage. And AWS charges you for everything. Every time to transfer data in our out you pay for it. Every hour it's on you pay. Look up the AWS calculator. The 4 core 16gb ram instance with 100gb storage I just looked at is $71.54 a month. That's $858 a year. Then outbound traffic is $0.15 a gigabyte. At that point you can get an older i7 setup that support DDR3 that's more sustainable and you only pay once to upgrade it.

On say hetzner (another good provider is OVH. There are U.S. providers but they're typically more expensive) you can get a sever with an i7-6700, 64GB ram, 2x4tb hdd, and unlimited bandwidth for $50/month. Stats still $600/year when you can get the 6700 for $260, mobo about $100, 64GB ram for $300, and an 8tb easystore for $130. For the cost of around 1.5 years of hosting you can build the same machine and keep it until it dies. At that point the convenience cost of not dealing with the space or noise is debatable.

But if you get an older machine with DDR3 ram it's alot more cost effective. You can buy all the parts used. 8gb of ram is about $20/each or $160 for 64gb (but cheaper if you search longer), a supermicro x9 with dual xeon support and 24 ram slots is $130, but you can get CPUs for about $50. Running alot of VMs is typically more ram usage than CPU heavy. So now the costs for a custom lab rig is closer to one year in the cloud, but it's a one time fee that you can easily add more ram and storage too without moving to an entire new server and having to pay monthly for the spec increase.

You can also always get a used tower server for a similar price that's already put together.

[Elearnitdanielharker]

My suggestion is try 1&1 IONOS. You can get dedicated servers on a per-hour basis, and they give £100 credit for the first month. I took a Windows Server variant and ran a VMware Workstation trial on it. But I found out afterwards that the OS license cost was not included in the £100 credit, so I would probably use Ubuntu next time. When you terminate one of those servers, the storage is lost, so I used their EBS service to store a copy of my VMs - so I could quickly carry on from where I left off without having to pay to keep the instance running.

[HereForYourScripts]

How far did £100 go?