Home server help

[MME1122]

Hi all, 

 

I'm looking to put together a new home server and networking setup. I've built plenty of desktops but never a dedicated server, and I've been doing a lot of reading here but still feeling confused so I could use some advice about where to start. 

Here's what I'd like to do with it:
Plex server - max usage would likely be 1 4K stream and 2 1080p streams, would like to transcode reasonably well. 

radarr and/or sonarr for plex
Home assistant
General NAS for storage and backups from various devices, nothing particularly demanding. I was thinking 3-4 drives with 1 fault tolerance. 
Routing - OPNsense or similar 

Can I do all of this off of one box? I see proxmox recommended frequently for virtualization so I was leaning towards that.

So it would be proxmox>TrueNAS>Plex

                                        >Home assistant

                                        >OPNsense

 

Looking for recommendations on CPUs, memory needed, motherboards, expansion cards needed, chassis. Rackmount would be nice for the future but not necessary. 

 

thanks!

 

[Shipohoy]

 

[Shipohoy]

Just now, Shipohoy said:

I’m thinking of doing the exact same thing, idea so it will be interesting what the fourm will say. I was looking at something like a lga 1151 intel 8100t chip, power draw is another big one for me 

 

[MME1122]

7 hours ago, Shipohoy said:

 

Yeah I'd like to be power efficient with this build both for cost and heat/noise. 

[LIGISTX]

11 hours ago, MME1122 said:

Hi all, 

 

I'm looking to put together a new home server and networking setup. I've built plenty of desktops but never a dedicated server, and I've been doing a lot of reading here but still feeling confused so I could use some advice about where to start. 

Here's what I'd like to do with it:
Plex server - max usage would likely be 1 4K stream and 2 1080p streams, would like to transcode reasonably well. 

radarr and/or sonarr for plex
Home assistant
General NAS for storage and backups from various devices, nothing particularly demanding. I was thinking 3-4 drives with 1 fault tolerance. 
Routing - OPNsense or similar 

Can I do all of this off of one box? I see proxmox recommended frequently for virtualization so I was leaning towards that.

So it would be proxmox>TrueNAS>Plex

                                        >Home assistant

                                        >OPNsense

 

Looking for recommendations on CPUs, memory needed, motherboards, expansion cards needed, chassis. Rackmount would be nice for the future but not necessary. 

 

thanks!

 

You can, but I wouldn’t. 
 

Don’t virtualize your firewall. It’s a huge pain in the ass. I do it, but only because I am dumb enough to even tho I full well know it’s a massive pain. Especially don’t do it if you have never ran an enterprise grade firewall. Learning opnsense + it being virtualized, that won’t be a good time. Example though excitement…. What happens when your opnsense VM goes down. How do you access it? You have no network without your router, so how do you access your hypervisor to fix whatever went wrong? You also have no internet……..

 

The rest, yes. But if you want to virtualize TrueNAS, you need a PCIe HBA to pass through to it so it has direct access to the harddrives. ZFS needs this, or you are setting yourself for failure. Dell h310’s flashed to IT mode with SAS> SATA breakout cables can be had for ~40 bucks on ebay. Do that, pass the HBA through to TrueNAS, and you’re good. 
 

I’d target 32 GB of RAM, 16 for TrueNAS, the rest for your other VM’s (id put plex in a VM under Proxmox, don’t run it inside TrueNAS) and you will be solid. 

[MME1122]

That makes a lot of sense, I'll look at a separate box for OPNsense then. 

 

Reading more on TrueNas I saw they recommend 1GB RAM for every TB storage so 16GB for that sounds good to me. I'll start with probably 8TB of storage because that's what I have on hand. 

 

How about CPU? I see that Intel with iris XE graphics is recommended for plex, I'm not sure how many cores I would need though for the whole build. I don't think I would put so much load through plex to need a dedicated gpu, not totally sure though. 

[MME1122]

Does it make sense to skip proxmox especially if the routing will be separate? Just run plex within trueNAS, and then add home assistant as a VM from within TrueNAS? 

 

That would eliminate the need for the HBA. 

 

Also dumb question...can you not just assign the Sata ports to the trueNAS VM? 

[Bersella AI]

3 hours ago, MME1122 said:

How about CPU? I see that Intel with iris XE graphics is recommended for plex, I'm not sure how many cores I would need though for the whole build.

A quad-core i3 processor would suffice. I'm even utilizing an older dual-core Pentium G4600 processor for Jellyfin.

 

3 hours ago, MME1122 said:

Does it make sense to skip proxmox especially if the routing will be separate? Just run plex within trueNAS, and then add home assistant as a VM from within TrueNAS? 

 

That would eliminate the need for the HBA. 

 

Also dumb question...can you not just assign the Sata ports to the trueNAS VM? 

Yes, this makes sense. Both Plex and Home Assistant may be hosted by Docker containers and have access to pools on the host, thus reducing overhead and required configurations.

While I did not make VMs on TrueNAS, well it's not possible to pass a SATA port or controller through to VMs on it.

[LIGISTX]

11 hours ago, MME1122 said:

Reading more on TrueNas I saw they recommend 1GB RAM for every TB storage so 16GB for that sounds good to me. I'll start with probably 8TB of storage because that's what I have on hand. 

This is sort of true.... ZFS is built for enterprise appliations, not home users. When you have LOTS of people or lots of appliances access data on the ZFS array, yes, you want A LOT of RAM to allow the ARC cache to speed things up, but for home use, this just doesn't matter. You can run a 50-100 TB array on 16 GB for home use and itll be fine. More RAM is better, but, don't get too lost in the ZFS weeds.

 

12 hours ago, MME1122 said:

How about CPU? I see that Intel with iris XE graphics is recommended for plex, I'm not sure how many cores I would need though for the whole build. I don't think I would put so much load through plex to need a dedicated gpu, not totally sure though. 

For your use case, pretty much any CPU from the last decade would be fast enough. I ran my previous homelab on an i3 6100, which was 2 cores with HT for a total of 4 threads. I had truenas, a handful of ubuntu VM's (1 of which hosted plex), handful of docker containers, home assistant, and a windows 11 LTSC VM, and it was entirely fine, all of that on 32 GB of RAM a well. 

 

As far s transcoding goes, you only want to transcode when you have to. When you are watching content at home, make sure the content is in a format the player and the TV both support, and then it will be direct play, which is literally just streaming data over ethernet and doesn't hit the CPU or GPU at all - this is also the highest quality, transcoding always hurts quality, even if you can't really tell. I am a quality snob, thus why I only direct play media, and its alwasy 4k HDR or better when available.... And to do that my CPU doesn't even try, because its effectively not doing anything except pumping a ~80mbps data stream out over ethernet. 

 

11 hours ago, MME1122 said:

Does it make sense to skip proxmox especially if the routing will be separate? Just run plex within trueNAS, and then add home assistant as a VM from within TrueNAS? 

From my experience, running HA in a docker container is not great. I had strange network discovery issues since docker networking is.... uh, well, kinda annoying tbh. Its FANTASTIC for running containers that don't need to dicover other devices on your network, but I did have some issues trying to get that all to play we.. Not saying you can't, lots of folks do, but this is once more reason I like to run things in actual VM's, and then within those VM's run docker containers where applicable. 

 

An HBA is 40 bucks, and it will genuinly unlock a lot of homelab capabilities for you. Proxmox is a proper hypervisor, and the world really is your oyster at that point.

 

Networking is set up via your VM's using SMB or NFS to your truenas shares, but proxmos when using the virtIO driver basically swaps "network" data between VM's via RAM, so even tho its "a network share" from truenas to the VM that would host, say, plex, it would be more or less at the speed proxmox can shuffle that data from VM RAM to VM RAM; it shows as "10gig", but in reality its way faster. 

 

11 hours ago, MME1122 said:

Also dumb question...can you not just assign the Sata ports to the trueNAS VM? 

7 hours ago, Bersella AI said:

While I did not make VMs on TrueNAS, well it's not possible to pass a SATA port or controller through to VMs on it.

You can't pass individual SATA ports through, no. You can only pass entire PCIe devices, and the SATA controller in your motherboard is a PCIe device. But the issue here is, if you only have a single SATA controller, you can't pass it through to truenas because now you have no way to actually boot Proxmox since every SATA port proxmox can no longer access. If you have a m.2 slot on your mobo, you can use that for proxmox boot and pass the mobo's SATA controller through to truenas and that would work fine, yes. I would still try and use an HBA whenver possible though, its just a cleaner option, and since LSI HBA's are enterprise parts, they basically work forever and rarely have any issues.

[HomeLabAddict]

Have you looked into Unraid?

it might be the one stop shop you are looking for. I have been using it for the last 2.5 years and I love it! It offers a easy to learn GUI, very easy docker support, VM support and much more

[BoomerDutch]

On 1/25/2025 at 3:23 AM, LIGISTX said:

 

Don’t virtualize your firewall. It’s a huge pain in the ass. I do it, but only because I am dumb enough to even tho I full well know it’s a massive pain. Especially don’t do it if you have never ran an enterprise grade firewall. Learning opnsense + it being virtualized, that won’t be a good time. Example though excitement…. What happens when your opnsense VM goes down. How do you access it? You have no network without your router, so how do you access your hypervisor to fix whatever went wrong? You also have no internet……..

Excuse me? 

 

I have pfsense inside proxmox and i have openwrt router outside of proxmox and my promox is connected through my pfsense VM but if it ever goes down all i need is to connect openwrt then use WAN ip address to acces it in order to fix it.

 

But downtime of a router is rare situation mostly only that happens if you don't have start at boot turned on.

 

And it doesn't matter that i have also WAN ip address since it's already protected by openwrt and can be only connected locally anyway by how I've configured.

 

Lastly you can connect directly to proxmox with static address and is accessable without dhcp/router for maintenance.

[LIGISTX]

3 minutes ago, BoomerDutch said:

Excuse me? 

 

I have pfsense inside proxmox and i have openwrt router outside of proxmox and my promox is connected through my pfsense VM but if it ever goes down all i need is to connect openwrt then use WAN ip address to acces it in order to fix it.

Yes, it’s obviously a solvable problem, but my point is if the person trying to set up virtualized networking as their edge router, and more importantly main router, they need to be able to figure out how to do this own their own. Things will go wrong, and they need to have a good enough network understanding to fix the problems. 
 

I run pfSense virtualized, and it’s the only router/firewall/DHCP device on my entire network. So if something goes wrong, Proxmox is set internally to static IP so I plug my laptop directly into my Proxmox’s LAN, put my laptop on the same subnet manually, and then yes, I can connect to Proxmox and fix the issue. Again, yes, it’s solvable, and I have done this more than once because of an issue that popped up or a config mistake I made. But this is highly not recommended until the person doing it is pretty familiar with networking. Getting into networking and virtualization is not the place to jump head first into virtualized pfsense as your edge or main router. 
 

8 minutes ago, BoomerDutch said:

But downtime of a router is rare situation mostly only that happens if you don't have start at boot turned on.

Unless you mistakenly mess something up, which happens. And then when it doesn’t boot, you get stressed and nervous, and potentially make things worse. Again, it’s entirely doable, but it is highly not recommended for someone just starting. 

[BoomerDutch]

2 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Yes, it’s obviously a solvable problem, but my point is if the person trying to set up virtualized networking as their edge router, and more importantly main router, they need to be able to figure out how to do this own their own. Things will go wrong, and they need to have a good enough network understanding to fix the problems. 

But this is highly not recommended until the person doing it is pretty familiar with networking. Getting into networking and virtualization is not the place to jump head first into virtualized pfsense as your edge or main router. 

 

Unless you mistakenly mess something up, which happens. And then when it doesn’t boot, you get stressed and nervous, and potentially make things worse. Again, it’s entirely doable, but it is highly not recommended for someone just starting. 

You made good points, i just wanted make his plan possible.

 

Which is have two routers outside and inside to make his plan possible and easy since you'll only need to switch to outside router and connect 

 

(Yes you can have multiple ip addresses to be accessable web gui)

 

If OP wants deploy once and forget then sure it's unwise.

 

And starting networking and virtualizing same time is not great start however proxmox does require basic networking skill and virtualising.

 

At this age and time setting up routers is relative easy with pfsense because of setup wizard also usually most routers have default settings which is secure enough with only exception is wifi.

[MME1122]

On 1/25/2025 at 11:34 AM, Bersella AI said:

A quad-core i3 processor would suffice. I'm even utilizing an older dual-core Pentium G4600 processor for Jellyfin.

 

Yes, this makes sense. Both Plex and Home Assistant may be hosted by Docker containers and have access to pools on the host, thus reducing overhead and required configurations.

While I did not make VMs on TrueNAS, well it's not possible to pass a SATA port or controller through to VMs on it.

 

On 1/25/2025 at 7:36 PM, LIGISTX said:

This is sort of true.... ZFS is built for enterprise appliations, not home users. When you have LOTS of people or lots of appliances access data on the ZFS array, yes, you want A LOT of RAM to allow the ARC cache to speed things up, but for home use, this just doesn't matter. You can run a 50-100 TB array on 16 GB for home use and itll be fine. More RAM is better, but, don't get too lost in the ZFS weeds.

 

For your use case, pretty much any CPU from the last decade would be fast enough. I ran my previous homelab on an i3 6100, which was 2 cores with HT for a total of 4 threads. I had truenas, a handful of ubuntu VM's (1 of which hosted plex), handful of docker containers, home assistant, and a windows 11 LTSC VM, and it was entirely fine, all of that on 32 GB of RAM a well. 

 

As far s transcoding goes, you only want to transcode when you have to. When you are watching content at home, make sure the content is in a format the player and the TV both support, and then it will be direct play, which is literally just streaming data over ethernet and doesn't hit the CPU or GPU at all - this is also the highest quality, transcoding always hurts quality, even if you can't really tell. I am a quality snob, thus why I only direct play media, and its alwasy 4k HDR or better when available.... And to do that my CPU doesn't even try, because its effectively not doing anything except pumping a ~80mbps data stream out over ethernet. 

 

From my experience, running HA in a docker container is not great. I had strange network discovery issues since docker networking is.... uh, well, kinda annoying tbh. Its FANTASTIC for running containers that don't need to dicover other devices on your network, but I did have some issues trying to get that all to play we.. Not saying you can't, lots of folks do, but this is once more reason I like to run things in actual VM's, and then within those VM's run docker containers where applicable. 

 

An HBA is 40 bucks, and it will genuinly unlock a lot of homelab capabilities for you. Proxmox is a proper hypervisor, and the world really is your oyster at that point.

 

Networking is set up via your VM's using SMB or NFS to your truenas shares, but proxmos when using the virtIO driver basically swaps "network" data between VM's via RAM, so even tho its "a network share" from truenas to the VM that would host, say, plex, it would be more or less at the speed proxmox can shuffle that data from VM RAM to VM RAM; it shows as "10gig", but in reality its way faster. 

 

You can't pass individual SATA ports through, no. You can only pass entire PCIe devices, and the SATA controller in your motherboard is a PCIe device. But the issue here is, if you only have a single SATA controller, you can't pass it through to truenas because now you have no way to actually boot Proxmox since every SATA port proxmox can no longer access. If you have a m.2 slot on your mobo, you can use that for proxmox boot and pass the mobo's SATA controller through to truenas and that would work fine, yes. I would still try and use an HBA whenver possible though, its just a cleaner option, and since LSI HBA's are enterprise parts, they basically work forever and rarely have any issues.

 

Thanks for the detailed replies. It definitely seems like I don't need as much horsepower as I thought. I think I have a good idea where to start now. 

 

For transcoding, honestly I don't know what all my file types are or what my players support (primarily chromecast right now). If you couldn't tell I'm new to a lot of this but I'll definitely start sorting that out so everything runs better. 

 

I've also heard bad things about HA as a docker so I'll go for the VM solution. 

It does seem like the proxmox route is good in the long run so I will do that, even  if it's not strictly necessary for what I want to do today. Seems like if I want to other things later on it will be nice to have. 

 

20 hours ago, HomeLabAddict said:

Have you looked into Unraid?

it might be the one stop shop you are looking for. I have been using it for the last 2.5 years and I love it! It offers a easy to learn GUI, very easy docker support, VM support and much more

 

I've heard of it but not for some time. I'll look into it a bit more.