New Homelab

[Misinthe]

Good evening everyone,

 

I am trying to set a new homelab in my new house, I want to get a rack and be able to get rackmount equipment, of course, my wife does not want me to have this anywhere else but in my office, so I need to find a solution to the always present "sound" issue with servers. I want to have one server for a NAS and one or two for Virtualization.

 

I was thinking on getting the Chenbro NR12000 for NAS, since it's a 1U 12 bays, and the reviews say it's fairly quiet to have inside an office room.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Chenbro-NR12000-1U-1x-8m-QUAD-CORE-E3-1220-3-1GHz-8GB-RAM-NO-HDD/283647606276?hash=item420ab6fe04:g:3RcAAOSwQ3JgWXwV

 

Do you guys have any ideas on what to get for virtualization? I want it to be heavy on processor and ram, Storage is not as much of a deal since I can always use the NAS pool for them. My budget is around $200-$300 for each, not including storage.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id just get a tower server. And have one box for storage + virt box.

 

How much cpu + ram do you neeed? Id probalby go with a rzyen 8/12 core and 64/128gb of ram

 

 

HOw much storage do you need

[Misinthe]

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id just get a tower server. And have one box for storage + virt box.

 

How much cpu + ram do you neeed? Id probalby go with a rzyen 8/12 core and 64/128gb of ram

 

 

HOw much storage do you need

Well, I wanted to get 12 4TB drives, that way I could have Raid 6 and still have 40TB of storage. My issue with having one box is that there's a few VMs that I want to run, including a Plex server. So I don't know if 1 will be enough. I was actually thinking on doing 1 NAS, 1 VM server and 1 Plex standalone machine. As for RAM, it would depend on what the server ends up doing. If it's only a NAS, I think 16GB should be good. For virtuals I want at least like 64GB. I'm making a list of all the VMs I want to run, so far I have 5, for different projects, like Home Assistant, Pihole, etc. 

[Haraikomono]

for home usage,  id go with a short depth case and rack.

really makes placing it in the much easier

[Electronics Wizardy]

50 minutes ago, Miguel552 said:

Well, I wanted to get 12 4TB drives, that way I could have Raid 6 and still have 40TB of storage. My issue with having one box is that there's a few VMs that I want to run, including a Plex server. So I don't know if 1 will be enough. I was actually thinking on doing 1 NAS, 1 VM server and 1 Plex standalone machine. As for RAM, it would depend on what the server ends up doing. If it's only a NAS, I think 16GB should be good. For virtuals I want at least like 64GB. I'm making a list of all the VMs I want to run, so far I have 5, for different projects, like Home Assistant, Pihole, etc. 

Id get fewer bigger drives, lower power, lower noise, normally cheaper per tb, and easier to upgrade.

 

You can easily run this all on one box. I have a single server with about 20vms running now, and 14 hdds. Performance isn't a big issue..

 

All o fthe vms you listed won't need much cpu(unless you doing very heavy plex transcoding). Id go with a ryzen desktop here.

[Blue4130]

2 hours ago, Miguel552 said:

Well, I wanted to get 12 4TB drives, that way I could have Raid 6 and still have 40TB of storage. My issue with having one box is that there's a few VMs that I want to run, including a Plex server. So I don't know if 1 will be enough. I was actually thinking on doing 1 NAS, 1 VM server and 1 Plex standalone machine. As for RAM, it would depend on what the server ends up doing. If it's only a NAS, I think 16GB should be good. For virtuals I want at least like 64GB. I'm making a list of all the VMs I want to run, so far I have 5, for different projects, like Home Assistant, Pihole, etc. 

I get the desire of having a bad ass rack full of servers, but everything @Electronics Wizardyis spot on. This really could (should?) be done from one well spec'd tower instead of 2/3 lesser machines. It's easy to fall into the used dell trap, lured by cheap prices, but then not realize how loud/expensive they can be.

 

And going diy in a rack case is fine, but I still prefer a nice large tower for an office situation. 

[Misinthe]

7 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id get fewer bigger drives, lower power, lower noise, normally cheaper per tb, and easier to upgrade.

 

You can easily run this all on one box. I have a single server with about 20vms running now, and 14 hdds. Performance isn't a big issue..

 

All o fthe vms you listed won't need much cpu(unless you doing very heavy plex transcoding). Id go with a ryzen desktop here.

 So my current server is a Ryzen 5 2600 (6C12T), with 16GB of RAM, 4 4TB drives, no raid so I have all 16TB available, and I have a 250GB ssd for OS. I am currently running it with a Windows Pro OS, just for media server and seedbox. All inside a Fractal Design R6, I think it can take up to 10 drives, and I like it because it has dampening material on the side panels for silent operation.

 

Should I just try and upgrade that instead? I don't know if that processor would be enough, I definetly need more RAM and Storage though, I only have 700GB left of the 16TB.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, Miguel552 said:

 So my current server is a Ryzen 5 2600 (6C12T), with 16GB of RAM, 4 4TB drives, no raid so I have all 16TB available, and I have a 250GB ssd for OS. I am currently running it with a Windows Pro OS, just for media server and seedbox. All inside a Fractal Design R6, I think it can take up to 10 drives, and I like it because it has dampening material on the side panels for silent operation.

 

Should I just try and upgrade that instead? I don't know if that processor would be enough, I definetly need more RAM and Storage though, I only have 700GB left of the 16TB.

 

Yea Id get some bigger drives, like 16tb drives.

 

CPU should be fine, what cpu usage do you see?

 

Id get 64gb of ram here.

 

Id probably put a hypervisor on it or use hyper-v.

[Misinthe]

4 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yea Id get some bigger drives, like 16tb drives.

 

CPU should be fine, what cpu usage do you see?

 

Id get 64gb of ram here.

 

Id probably put a hypervisor on it or use hyper-v.

The reason I wanted to go for smaller drives is because I can't afford many 16TB, and I wanted to add redundancy. So if I get 2 16TB, I can't have redundancy unless I use 1 of them in Raid 1.

 

CPU hovers around 10% when I'm on it but I haven't seen it under load with all my streams going. 

 

I agree about the ram, it's my biggest issue right now, I have it set to restar every night at 4am to clear out the ram because it gets maxed out and makes the server super slow. 

 

How would I do the hypervisor and nas in the same box? Load hypervisor first and then a free as virtual for all the storage? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Miguel552 said:

The reason I wanted to go for smaller drives is because I can't afford many 16TB, and I wanted to add redundancy. So if I get 2 16TB, I can't have redundancy unless I use 1 of them in Raid 1.

 

CPU hovers around 10% when I'm on it but I haven't seen it under load with all my streams going. 

 

I agree about the ram, it's my biggest issue right now, I have it set to restar every night at 4am to clear out the ram because it gets maxed out and makes the server super slow. 

 

How would I do the hypervisor and nas in the same box? Load hypervisor first and then a free as virtual for all the storage? 

How many tb total? You said you wanted 40tb earlier, so id probably do something like 16tb x4 and run a raid 5.

 

Whats your backup plan. Id say that atter much more here than raid config.

 

Ram should't need a daily reboot, seems like something wrong is going on ehre.

 

What hypervisor do you want to use? Id probably use proxmox, so just let proxmox do zfs for storage, and then make a container/vm that shares some of that storage over the network.

[Misinthe]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How many tb total? You said you wanted 40tb earlier, so id probably do something like 16tb x4 and run a raid 5.

 

Whats your backup plan. Id say that atter much more here than raid config.

 

Ram should't need a daily reboot, seems like something wrong is going on ehre.

 

What hypervisor do you want to use? Id probably use proxmox, so just let proxmox do zfs for storage, and then make a container/vm that shares some of that storage over the network.

Yeah, but I wanted to build up little by little, I don't have $1000 to spend on just on drives right now, and adding to the last part, I was looking into proxmox, but for zfs you need to have all the drives from the start to create the pool right? You can't add a drive after, it would have to be a whole new pool. 

 

For backup I was thinking using an external 10tb drive I have just for the proxmox backup and important files. 

 

The RAM issue has to do with the seed box part of the server, it gets filled so fast. 

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, Miguel552 said:

Yeah, but I wanted to build up little by little, I don't have $1000 to spend on just on drives right now, and adding to the last part, I was looking into proxmox, but for zfs you need to have all the drives from the start to create the pool right? You can't add a drive after, it would have to be a whole new pool. 

 

For backup I was thinking using an external 10tb drive I have just for the proxmox backup and important files. 

 

The RAM issue has to do with the seed box part of the server, it gets filled so fast. 

 

 

You can add drives to zfs, do something with mirrors, and just add anouther mirror or vdev later on. 

 

Id probably just save up for bigger drives, really its the better solution. Look for deals on schucked drives.

 

That seems like a bug for ram, My seed box goes months without a reboot.

[Misinthe]

50 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can add drives to zfs, do something with mirrors, and just add anouther mirror or vdev later on. 

 

Id probably just save up for bigger drives, really its the better solution. Look for deals on schucked drives.

 

That seems like a bug for ram, My seed box goes months without a reboot.

You can add drives but they have to be separate pools right? So it has to be a minimum of 3 drives for each pool? What are the "mirrors" you are talking about?

 

I think it was uTorrent that was causing issues, it was also killing my network stability. I switched to BitTorrent and it's been a lot better lately. But it used to be up to like 90% at the end of each day. I checked now and CPU is under 5% and RAM is around 25%.

[Electronics Wizardy]

17 hours ago, Miguel552 said:

You can add drives but they have to be separate pools right? So it has to be a minimum of 3 drives for each pool? What are the "mirrors" you are talking about?

 

I think it was uTorrent that was causing issues, it was also killing my network stability. I switched to BitTorrent and it's been a lot better lately. But it used to be up to like 90% at the end of each day. I checked now and CPU is under 5% and RAM is around 25%.

You can add vdevs to a pool later. on.  A zfs pool is filled with vdevs. a  vdev can be a single disk, raid 5/6(called raid z1/z2/z3) and a mirror. You cn have a single drive pool in zfs if you wnt.

 

 

[Misinthe]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can add vdevs to a pool later. on.  A zfs pool is filled with vdevs. a  vdev can be a single disk, raid 5/6(called raid z1/z2/z3) and a mirror. You cn have a single drive pool in zfs if you wnt.

 

 

Thank you so much for all your help and time. I think I have a game plan now. Try and get 4 x 16TB in Raid 5 for 1 x 48TB vdev, then once I have emptied my old drives, I can add those 4 x 4TB in Raid 5 for another 1 x 12TB vdev, so I can have a total of 60TB in the pool for my files and media. Then, I'll upgrade to 64GB of RAM for my VMs. Install Proxmox on my SSD, and start from there.