I would documented everything as I go.
I am a hobbyist running a proxmox server with a docker host for media server, a plex host, a nas host, and home assistant host.
I feel if It were to break It would take me a long time to rebuild.
Ansible everything and automate as you go. It is slower, but if it’s not your first time setting something up it’s not too bad. Right now I literally couldn’t care less if the SD on one of my raspberry pi’s dies. Or my monitoring backend needs to be reinstalled.
I would have taken a deep dive into docker and containerised pretty much everything.
Same here. Now I’m half docker and half random other stuff.
Same for me. I’ve known about Docker for many years now but never understood why I would want to use it when I can just as easily install things directly and just never touch them. Then I ran into dependency problems where two pieces of software required different versions of the same library. Docker just made this problem completely trivial.
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Instead of a 4-bay NAS, I would have gone with a 6-bay.
You only realize just how expensive it is to expand on your space when you have to REPLACE HDDs rather than simply adding more.
My current homelab is running on a single Dell R720xd with 12x6TB SAS HDDs. I have ESXi as the hypervisor with a pfsense gateway and a trueNAS core vm. It’s compact, has lots of redundancy, can run everything I want and more, has IPMI, and ECC RAM. Great, right?
Well, it sucks back about 300w at idle, sounds like a jet engine all the time, and having everything on one machine is fragile as hell.
Not to mention the Aruba Networks switch and Eaton UPS that are also loud.
I had to beg my dad to let it live at his house because no matter what I did: custom fan curves, better c-state management, a custom enclosure with sound isolation and ducting, I could not dump heat fast enough to make it quiet and it was driving me mad.
I’m in the process of doing it better. I’m going to build a small NAS using consumer hardware and big, quiet fans, I have a fanless N6005 box as a gateway, and I’m going to convert my old gaming machine to a hypervisor using proxmox, with each VM managed with either docker-compose, Ansible, or nixOS.
…and I’m now documenting everything.
I’ve had an R710 at the foot of my bed for the past 4 years and only decommissioned it a couple of months ago. I haven’t configured anything but I don’t really notice the noise. I can tell that it’s there but only when I listen for it. Different people are bothered by different sounds maybe?
I had an r710 before the r720xd. The r710 was totally fine, the r720xd is crazy loud.
Huh that’s interesting, thanks!
That’s crazy to me! I had an R710 and that thing was so loud. I could hear it across the house.
For me if I can hear it at all when sitting near it in a quiet room, it’s a no-go.
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I haven’t built one myself, but you could look into TrueNas.
Make sure my proxmox desktop build can do GPU passthrough.
I already did a few months ago. My setup was a mess, everything tacked on the host OS, some stuff installed directly, others as docker, firewall was just a bunch of hand-written iptables rules…
I got a newer motherboard and CPU to replace my ageing i5-2500K, so I decided to start from scratch.
First order of business: Something to manage VMs and containers. Second: a decent firewall. Third: One app, one container.
I ended up with:
- Proxmox as VM and container manager
- OPNSense as firewall. Server has 3 network cards (1 built-in, 2 on PCIe slots), the 2 add-ons are passed through to OPNSense, the built in is for managing Proxmox and for the containers .
- A whole bunch of LXC containers running all sorts of stuff.
Things look a lot more professional and clean, and it’s all much easier to manage.
More ram 🐏
To be honest, nothing. Running my home server on a nuc with proxmox and a 8 bay synology Nas (though I’m glad that I went with 8 bay back then!).
As a router I have opnsense running on a low powered mini pc.All in all I couldn’t wish for more (low power, high performance, easy to maintain) for my use case, but I’ll soon need some storage and ram upgrade on the proxmox server.
I have things scattered around different machines (a hangover from my previous network configuration that was running off two separate routers) so I’d probably look to have everything on one machine.
Also I kind of rushed setting up my Dell server and I never really paid any attention to how it was set up for RAID. I also currently have everything running on separate VMs rather than in containers.
I may at some point copy the important stuff off my server and set it up from scratch.
I may also move from using a load balancer to manage incoming connections to doing it via Cloudflare Tunnels.
The thing is there’s always something to tinker with and I’ve learnt a lot building my little home lab. There’s always something new to play around with and learn.
Is my setup optimal? Hell no. Does it work? Yep. 🙂
I would spend more time planning and understanding docker. My setup works, but it’s kinda messy
The only real pain point I have is my hard drive layout. I’ve got a bunch of different drive sizes that are hard to expand on without wasting space or spending a ton.
Depending on your comfort level and setup, you could use LVM. Then the differently sized hard drives wouldn’t be such a problem.
Or if you want a much more complex situation, you could set up Ceph. It will also give you redundancy, but it’s a really steep learning curve.
Or mergerfs if you are not too concerned with performance
Btrfs also allows for mixed size drive. It’s the reason why I use it
Edit: autocorrect
I’m on btrfs. I have a 14 TB, a 16TB, and two 7TB drives in RAID1. I’m running out of space for all my linux ISOs and I’d really like to transition to some sort of 3 or 4:1 parity raid, but you’re not supposed to use that and I don’t see a clear path to a ZFS pool or something
Probably splurge just a bit more for CMR hard drives in my ZFS setup. I’ve had some pretty scary moments in my current setup.
I’d put my storage in a proper nas machine rather than having 25tb strewn across 4 boxes
Use actual nas drives. Do not use shucked external drives, they are cheaper for a reason, not meant for 24-7. Though I guess they did get me through a couple years, and hard drive prices seem to keep falling.
