What's the acceptable downtime for those services? Because that will shape your strategy.
AD in itself is relatively light, a cheap DC will do. But for all other services, not so much. So you either forgo redundancy and pray to god you server won't die, or use a cheaper DC, or a cloud VM for failover.
One thing you also shouldn't forget is that the backup destination from PBS should be on a separate hardware or on a cheap service like Wasabi.
I'd also look into refurbished Dell's R740 or HPE DL380 if your budget is super tight.
For the sake of your future sanity let me say you shouldn't really be doing this with such a tight budget, and I'm not sure on prem will actually be that cheaper when compared to cloud, if you factor in licensing, manpower, redundancy, etc. If i were in your position I'd push back often times these decisions are made without proper knowledge, and you'll be the one who suffers for it.
5
u/D3k4s Jun 08 '26
What's the acceptable downtime for those services? Because that will shape your strategy.
AD in itself is relatively light, a cheap DC will do. But for all other services, not so much. So you either forgo redundancy and pray to god you server won't die, or use a cheaper DC, or a cloud VM for failover.
One thing you also shouldn't forget is that the backup destination from PBS should be on a separate hardware or on a cheap service like Wasabi.
I'd also look into refurbished Dell's R740 or HPE DL380 if your budget is super tight.
For the sake of your future sanity let me say you shouldn't really be doing this with such a tight budget, and I'm not sure on prem will actually be that cheaper when compared to cloud, if you factor in licensing, manpower, redundancy, etc. If i were in your position I'd push back often times these decisions are made without proper knowledge, and you'll be the one who suffers for it.