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.

​

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.

​

Thank you very much in advance and greetings.

  • king_weenusBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    for context my plex has 5 people at home, 3 teens + 2 adults, I also have about a half dozen remote family and friends that use it. I run plex in docker without a GPU for transcoding and I can stream 3+ users with ease… a GPU would be better but I’m not there yet. Honestly plex is not that resource hungry except for transcoding, I’ve been testing plex lately and for me there is 0 difference between docker in a VM and bare metal.

    As for home assistant I have it running over 70 wifi devices and sensors, controlling almost every light, my HVAC system 100% in both my house and garage, timers, notifications, power monitoring with solar and EV charging, etc… and it runs on a VM with 2 cpu cores and 4gb of memory and 8gb HDD. It takes almost nothing to run.

    My docker server is ubuntu 22.04 in a VM with 8 cores and 16gb ram and I just doubled both of those for testing plex transcoding performance… I might go back to 4 & 8 but I have the resources so I’ll probably leave it.

    I also run TrueNas in a VM with 4c/16gb ram attached to a dedicated HBA with 4x4tb drives for media. This also runs perfectly fine.

    Honestly I ran all that on a i5-6500 with 32gb of ram and dual 128 SDD for boot until my PSU died and this new server was the cheaper option. With the server I can spin up VMs for testing and playing…

    if you want to go big with resources go for it… couldn’t hurt. But honestly windows gobbles resources, Linux not so much… my only concern now is that I have a single point of failure with that server but it’s far more robust than any consumer grade tech and I have backups.