Hi everyone ! I don’t really know if i am in the good place to post this, but here i am !
I am currently working on a project to build my own home server / home lab / NAS on prem.
I am having problems choosing the hardware sizing of my home server so that everything runs smoothly and can evolve in the future.
Originally I was thinking of using a Synology or QNAP NAS and running my applications and services in Docker containers directly on it.
That said, the more I advance in my project, the more I realize that the computing power of a NAS, or at least that type of NAS would surely be insufficient to self-host the number of applications or services that I would like to set up.
So I started to get interested in making my own server directly at home, and combining everything with a NAS.
Several options are available to me, but I admit I have difficulty choosing.
Here are the constraints of my project:
Note : All Choice of Software / Services are not final for now, but i would give you a broad view of what i intend to do with the server.
- I need to be able to run a NAS type file system with a similar redundancy system Synology Hybrid Raid. (That I can add disks later to the raid cluster and that these disks are not necessarily the same size) 100+ TB size. Iscsi is optional but could be nice. The goal is to be able to do video editing on files on the NAS, sharing these files with other people.
- IaC structure (Ansible or Docker Compose)
- Pfsense / Pihole / Wireguard
- 10 Gbe Ethernet or SFP+
- Media Center (Jellyfin and library management, Radarr, Sonarr all the rest)
- Docker w/ or w/o Kubernetes
- Security and Supervision: Like Wazuh, Authelia, Swag, DDClient …
- Cloud: NextCloud
- Deluge / Deluge VPN
- VaultWarden
- Homeassistant / Phoscon GW
- N8N
- Foundry VTT Server
- SUNSHINE / MOONLIGHT / RETROARCH
i know it’s a lot !
The goal of course is to find the most financially attractive hardware solution in terms of performance/price ratio. And also to have electricity consumption as controlled as possible.
I currently have 2 main ideas:
- A server + a NAS the server managing most of the applications and services and the NAS managing the file management aspect, which would allow me to benefit from solutions like Synology or Qnap in terms of ease of implementation in several places.
- An all-in-one server virtualized under Proxmox with virtual machines (a NAS, an application/service server, a PFsense server, even a desktop for remote access) more complex, but would allow having a single machine, but I lose the benefit of easy synchronization between two locations. (On-site and off-site)
What do you think? Do you have any other implementation ideas? What would be an optimal solution?
Thank you in advance for sharing your knowledge and experience with me.
Any recent PC will do. Naturally, if you plan on playing games on it (moonlight and sunshine) you should size appropriately, and I’d recommend not to mix your NAS with a gaming PC since games and accessory can crash your server.
Without gaming, any 8th generation Intel or newer with iGPU should handle most transcoding needs. It’s more than capable of handling all the services you mentioned (again, not considering gaming)
I’d look into mobile class cpu so it’s lighter on energy consumption.