I currently have a hodgepodge of solutions for my hosting needs. I play ttrpgs online, so have two FoundryVTT servers hosted on a pi. Then I have a second pi that is hosting Home Assistant. I then also have a synology device that is my NAS and hosts my Plex server.
I’m looking to build a home server with some leftover parts from a recent system upgrade that will be my one unified server doing all the above things in the same machine. A NAS, hosting a couple Foundry instances, home assistant, and plex/jellyfin.
My initial research has me considering Unraid. I understand that it’s a paid option and am okay with paying for convenience/good product. I’m open to other suggestions from this community.
The real advice I’m hoping to get here is a kind of order of operations. Assume I have decided on the OS I want to use for my needs, and my system is built. What would you say is the best way going about migrating all these services over to the new server and making sure that they are all reachable by web?
Can Proxmox with some containers/VMs address your needs?
Its what I’m running for a media server (a VM) and some containers for things like Pihole and Syncthing.
I don’t know, that’s why I’m here for advice lol. I’ve never had to tackle “which OS?” before.
Proxmox was the answer for me. OpenMediaVault in a VM for NAS, LXC containers for things that need GPU access (Plex and frigate). Hell, I even virtualized my router. One thing I probably should have done was a single docker host and learn podman or something similar. I ended up with 8 or 9 VMs that run 8 or 9 dockers. It works great, but it’s more to manage.
You’ll want 2 network cards/interfaces- one for the VMs and another for the host. Power usage is not great using old gaming parts. Discrete graphics seem to add 40 watts no matter what. A 5600G or Intel with quicksync will get the job done and save you a few bucks a month. I recently moved to a 7700x and transcode performance is great. Expect 100-150 watts 24/7 which costs me $10-15 month. But I can compile ESPHome binaries in a few seconds 🤣
It’s more overhead on the cpu, but it’s so easy.
It really was easy. And it works so well I didn’t have to lean the names of stuff haha
For anyone following along, I meant portainer to manage dockers. Podman is a different container technology it seems.
Proxmox sounds like it fits their use case , it’s a useful and tweakable solution, and because it’s based on KVM you can pass through hardware with IOMMU. Personally, I run Proxmox on my (admittedly not very good) home server with like 12 gigs of ram and a processor from the early 2010s, handles a few VMs just fine with hardware passthrough to a TrueNAS VM. I do run a lot of my micro services on some cheap thin clients (DNS mainly) for redundancy as I mentioned, they were cheap. Home Assistant OS is happy on Proxmox as is Jellyfin with hardware acceleration.
I run the same for years and has been rock solid.