Hello everyone, I am building a house, and I want to have a very good HomeLab for it, I want to connect all the home automation (Home Assistant) that will be enough, cameras with frigate or something similar, media server with Plex or Jellyfin (4k transcoding and about 4 simultaneous users), with their containers .arr, more containers for different purposes etc, something powerful and if possible that does not have a very high consumption. I have already thought about the routers and swich that will be Unify with POE ports to connect cameras, access points and others, the biggest doubt is the Hardware for the HomeLab. I would like it to be all in Rackmount format with more than 4 bays for hard drives, a powerful processor like an i7 13gen.

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Could someone give me a little guidance to see how to do it? Hardware, chassis etc? I’m not very clear and do not know how to follow.

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Thank you very much in advance and greetings.

  • Trustworthy_FartzzzBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Hey friend, you’re aiming for a setup very close to what I run. Some lessons from my fumbling:

    • Get a NUC and install HASSOS on it for Home Assistant. Treat it like an appliance and leave it to do it’s thing.
    • I run Frigate on a separate host with 2x Coral USB TPUs processing 5x 4K cameras. It sits at about 20% utilization.
    • Check out Simply NUC and UCTRONICS for rack shelves for NUCs and Pis. If you have other random hubs you want to rack check out this Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Print3DSteve
    • I highly recommend a NAS for media and other storage. I have a Synology RS819 and it’s solid for this, but I just bought a used Dell R720XD that I plan on loading up with drives and installing TrueNAS on. I’d check out used Synology options on eBay for your use case.

    Given your low power consumption requirements, I’d probably look at something like this:

    • 1x NUC for HASS
    • 1x NUC with Coral TPU for Frigate + other apps
    • 1-3x Pi4s or 5s for other random apps. I run mine using PoE hats to my UniFi gear.
    • 1x Synology rack mount w/ 5400 RPM drives (lower power consumption).

    If you want to do any AI/ML beyond Frigate, you’ll want a desktop GPU in the rack. I still haven’t found a good option here. I’ll likely get a rack case that works with desktop hardware and throw a 3090 into it.

    • Zeal514BEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      If you are gonna do all of this. Just run Proxmox on your Nucs, and set up VMs, and just containerize, even clustering.

      • Trustworthy_FartzzzBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, this is what I do - all containers with Ansible to manage it all. I would not recommend containerizing HASS though.

    • hidi1992OPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thank you very much for your answer
      Could you recommend me which NUC models would be suitable for this?
      I currently have a synology ds220+ and I have been very short especially with the Plex server I have to limit it to 1080p because otherwise the other services are very slow.
      Thank you very much

      • Trustworthy_FartzzzBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I would see which Intel GPUs are supported by Plex and choose a NUC with one of those.