Taking my first leap into getting a home lab up and running, going to be running proxmox, what are some resources and tips for getting up and running?

grasseater128 · July 13, 2023

Hi everyone, new to the forum and home labs. Yesterday I purchased all of my parts to get a server up and running and I want to make sure that I am ready to hit the ground running when all my parts show up. I want to run proxmox (unless you guys have a better solution) because it seems to be the most commonly used and feature-rich hypervisor out there. I primarily want to run a NAS and host some game servers and in the future migrate my smart home off of Google and to home assistant as well as host some web services for personal use. I am decently comfortable in the command line and so I am somewhat technically capable but I don't know much about virtualization and networking. I want to learn more and learn how to use docker which is some of my motivation for building this server, what are some tips to help me get set up and make sure my installation goes smoothly? Also, if you have any resources or fun stories from your own home labs I would love to hear them.

For those curious about the parts I picked out here's the list:

CWWK N51505/N6005 "NAS Demon Board" - Not using all of the Sata or RJ45's but room for expansion, like the low power draw and decent performance of the chip

Crucial 2x16gb DDR4 3200MHZ SO-DIMM - Not ECC but I am not doing anything mission critical and the board doesn't support ECC anyways. I think 32gb will be plenty for my use cases, what do you think?

WD 8TB Red Plus NAD HDD x2 - Not sure what kind of raid configuration I am going for yet but will most likely be raid 1, would like to do a raid 10 eventually but I need more drives. For now 8TB of capacity is plenty for me and so I am not concerned about losing half to raid.

Teamgroup MP33 512GB NVME SSD x2 - They were only 20$ each for primeday and only save 3$ each going with a 256gb drive instead. Planning to use as a boot drive and the other as a cache. Don't know much about setting up a cache drive, what are some options for that?

Corsair RM750x PSU - WAY overkill for my components but I believe it is fairly power efficient at lower voltages and maybe in the future I will steal it for my main PC (Only have a 650W in my main machine RN). Can't remember what the little guys are called that are super power efficient but I wasn't really in the mood to mess with one of those.

MetallicGear Neo V2 Micro-ATX Case - Didn't really care about the case too much, only needed to be able to hold my 2 disks for now, will upgrade in the future when I need more space or maybe DIY some cages since there no GPU. Picked this guy out because it should arrive at the same time as the rest of the components and came with a fan.

Hopefully I didn't make any big mistakes picking out my parts, like I said don't really know what I am doing when it comes to the server space. Any resources or tips for getting started are much appreciated. I have done some browsing on youtube for some channels to educate me and have found some that I like but haven't done too much investigation yet. TIA!