Need good advice for a gift

[ceciprov33]

I'm looking to surprise my husband with a home server, but have no idea where to start??? He is a Grad student for cyber security, all our computers run Ubuntu/Linux with Windows VMs, we also have multiple pi's in the house. I'm not computer savvy and really want to show him I care about his interest, so what are some things I should look for to make sure it is compatible with our OSS, has enough storage and speed???

[QIII]

Hello!

Do you have any idea what he would like to do with such a server? File server? Media server? Running multiple VMs? Running distributed computing projects like BOINC?

That is sort of in increasing order of expense.

Moved to the Cafe. Not an Ubuntu support request.

[bearlake]

Hi,

Show your husband your post and let him pick whats working for him.

Your post alone will likely surprise him in a very good way.

You may want to have a bottle of wine or whatever yous drink on ice. ):P

Good Luck!

[mastablasta]

for basic home servers the small HP Micro servers are a good choice. they have some option to expand form web/file server into media server. again it all depends what you do.

multiple virtual machines Will need more RAM for example. video encoding needs CPU power, decoding needs GPU power, data storage needs hard drive, backup server will do well on RAM and ofcoruse reliable hard drives.