Hi everyone,

I’d like to seek some advice on a proposed change of my home server setup that I’m considering.

Current setup:

  • Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian): with openHAB, Node-RED, Mosquitto, Grafana, InfluxDB, UniFi controller
  • Raspberry Pi 2 (Raspbian): with piHole, unbound, WireGuard
  • DS212 (DSM) as a NAS

Issues:

  1. High power consumption due to running three systems.
  2. Limited backups (currently only backing up configuration files).
  3. Occasional SD card corruptions (fortunately, backups have saved the day).
  4. The DS212 Web UI seems to get slower with each DSM update.

Proposed Solution: I’ve been considering consolidating everything onto one machine using a modern proxmox+Docker setup instead of running everything bare metal. Here’s my idea after some research:

  • Get an ASRock N100-based mainboard with 32GB RAM, a 500GB NVME drive, and 2 SATA ports (for the two 2TB SATA drives from my Synology).
  • Use the NVME for Proxmox and create two VMs:
  1. VM for all the smart home/networking applications (migrated from the RPi4+RPi2), isolated into Docker containers.
  2. VM for NAS functionality (any suggestions for a NAS OS?), using the two SATA drives in a RAID 1 configuration.

Questions: I would greatly appreciate your advice on the following:

  • Does my proposed hardware configuration seem suitable for my needs? Anything better than the N100? Do I need 32GB?
  • What NAS OS would you recommend for the second VM (TrueNAS, OMV, anything else)?
  • Are there potential drawbacks or challenges I should be aware of with this new setup? I have the feeling I am over complicating things.
  • Any other thoughts or suggestions?

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  • @prime_1996BEnglish
    1•7 months ago

    I would recommend an ultra small form factor or USSF mini pc, either dell, hp or lenovo.

    You can buy these used from ebay or Facebook marketplace.

    Most are core Intel core i5, anything from 6th gen is good.

    They normally support up to 32GB of ram, and 1 or 2 m.2 SSDs/NVME and a sata 2.5 drive.

    I would say 16GB is plenty for what you do.

    Mine runs proxmox and a bunch of LXC containers, running in a docker swarm cluster, with 16GB, and I can still play with Windows VMs.

    Mine idles at 13w, peaks to 35w under load.

    I have a 2tb crucial ssd with my data and I do backups using kopia to an external 2.5 HD.

    Really good all in one, small and efficient setup.