First server build - A serious one

[Drool9893]

Hello everyone.

I plan to build my first server after a long time and I want to make the right decision for the hardware. I will list below what I plan to do with it:

- Proxmox
- OPNSense firewall
- Arr stack ( jellyfin, radar, sonar, transmission, overseer, etc ) - I expect 2-3 users at the same time. 1080p mainly maybe some at 4K. - not public, available via Tailscale - Need good transcoding.
- Tailscale
- PiHole
- iSpy Agent DVR ( I already have a decent cloud solution as "main", this will be secondary and for my pleasure. A small retention and just save important events; I have 5 cameras )
- A Minecraft Server with mods
- 3+ DBs engines for my local development as testing ( inside LXC, idc about the data )
- 2 DBs engines for production ( inside a VM most likely )
- Caddy webservers for webapps ( no enterprise usage, but maybe a few thousands users? nothing fancy, later might actually move it out to cloud if it happens to grow big )
- Nextcloud ( I plan to store files and images of my family )
- Openbooks
- Ntfy
- Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf for IoT devices
- Whatever utility containers I might found.
 

I plan to run most of the things inside LXC and maybe just a few dedicated VMs for big stuff: OPNsense, MC Server, DB Prod, Nextcloud, iSpy Agent and the others things I want to run inside containers. Not sure if I can have an web interface to spawn proxmox lxc containers like Portainer ?

I am open to ideas on how to structure things as this is my first time stepping into this world.I am a developer and I have in plan to use Ansible and Terraform as IaC for VM and LXC definitions in order to make my life harder initially, easier later.
 

I plan to buy the HDDs refurbished as I now that I will need a few good TBs. I am not sure if I should go with a Raid 1 or something else yet ( for nextcloud and family stuff I surely want that ). I will buy it over time as my requirements grows. Maybe initially a total of 32TB or 64TB.
 

I am from Eastern Europe so I plan to buy things from my country or Amazon DE.
I am open to build it with new parts or used. I would love to build a micro desktop and mount it in a rack on my wall ( I don't have a big room )

My budget is flexible but I would love not to go crazy. Maybe an initial 2000-3000 Euros. I know the storage will eat a big part of this on the long run but I plan to buy it when I need it.

I am open to both Intel and AMD. I want it to be power efficient and It needs to accept multiple HDDs ( as many as possible 6-8 ideally )

[OddOod]

Welcome to the forums!
6 14TB drives in RAID Z1 will give 70TB of storage with 1 drive failure safety margin. It will cost at least 1kEUR though
With the rest of the money I'd recommend buying an LSI HBA (hopefully you can get a -8e-8i version so you can both serve the drives inside and have room for a small diskshelf/jbod) flashed to IT mode and slap that in some old workstation with a lot of cores and a power supply with some PCIe cables. Whatever money is left over should go to some old GPU. I run a 1070 in my server for transcoding

[Drool9893]

That sounds really good.

What CPU would you pair with that 1070? I wonder if a 5900x might be good?

[Bersella AI]

Let's focus on the most resource-demanding services first to determine optimal hardware.

• Minecraft, which works mostly on single thread, prefers a faster processor with higher boost clocks. The Ryzen 5000 series have been a little bit outpaced compared to 7000/9000 series in this regard; however, the former have more physical cores with the same budget (e.g., R9 5900XT vs. R7 9700X), hence worth considering for virtualization.
• Web servers, with public availability and thousands of users (Are you really sure about this?), should be properly configured, protected and, while applicable, physically isolated from all other stuff. Otherwise, your data would be at extreme risks from vulnerabilities in agents used for them.
• A considerable amount of RAM would also be needed for at least a few VMs listed here. 32 GB would be a good start I think.
• A discrete GPU would help a lot in transcoding while keeping efficient in power, especially with Ryzen non-G or Intel F (no iGPU or lacking video encoding units). Arc A380/A310 or even DG1 is worth considering here, and may be passed through to VMs.

The others should not be that demanding on performance and hence will be skipped.

On 4/14/2025 at 11:58 PM, Drool9893 said:

Not sure if I can have an web interface to spawn proxmox lxc containers like Portainer ?

While I have no experience with LXC, Portainer itself may manage all other containers via a Web interface, and requires only a few shell commands to set up. There are plenty of tutorials lying around.