One Server to Rule Them All: Seeking advice on consolidating my setup - eviltoast

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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  • DarkKnyt@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    If you are only rocking a few TBs, I’d recommend considering a way to switch to an all NVMe 2TB setup.

    I don’t there it yet but I’m either going to do a 4x SSD or a 8x NVMe icydock… But some newer mobos have two NVMe slots which can get you 8 TBs that you can then slap zfs on via proxmox.

    • aps02@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m also looking to go down the path of getting an icydock. Can you please clarify your proposed set up? Will you be getting an icydock and connecting it to your main hardware running proxmox via usb? I’m hoping to get an icydock to expand storage and connect it via usb to intel run which runs proxmox