Hello everyone, I am building a house, and I want to have a very good HomeLab for it, I want to connect all the home automation (Home Assistant) that will be enough, cameras with frigate or something similar, media server with Plex or Jellyfin (4k transcoding and about 4 simultaneous users), with their containers .arr, more containers for different purposes etc, something powerful and if possible that does not have a very high consumption. I have already thought about the routers and swich that will be Unify with POE ports to connect cameras, access points and others, the biggest doubt is the Hardware for the HomeLab. I would like it to be all in Rackmount format with more than 4 bays for hard drives, a powerful processor like an i7 13gen.
Could someone give me a little guidance to see how to do it? Hardware, chassis etc? I’m not very clear and do not know how to follow.
Thank you very much in advance and greetings.
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Hey friend, you’re aiming for a setup very close to what I run. Some lessons from my fumbling:
- Get a NUC and install HASSOS on it for Home Assistant. Treat it like an appliance and leave it to do it’s thing.
- I run Frigate on a separate host with 2x Coral USB TPUs processing 5x 4K cameras. It sits at about 20% utilization.
- Check out Simply NUC and UCTRONICS for rack shelves for NUCs and Pis. If you have other random hubs you want to rack check out this Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Print3DSteve
- I highly recommend a NAS for media and other storage. I have a Synology RS819 and it’s solid for this, but I just bought a used Dell R720XD that I plan on loading up with drives and installing TrueNAS on. I’d check out used Synology options on eBay for your use case.
Given your low power consumption requirements, I’d probably look at something like this:
- 1x NUC for HASS
- 1x NUC with Coral TPU for Frigate + other apps
- 1-3x Pi4s or 5s for other random apps. I run mine using PoE hats to my UniFi gear.
- 1x Synology rack mount w/ 5400 RPM drives (lower power consumption).
If you want to do any AI/ML beyond Frigate, you’ll want a desktop GPU in the rack. I still haven’t found a good option here. I’ll likely get a rack case that works with desktop hardware and throw a 3090 into it.
Thank you very much for your answer
Could you recommend me which NUC models would be suitable for this?
I currently have a synology ds220+ and I have been very short especially with the Plex server I have to limit it to 1080p because otherwise the other services are very slow.
Thank you very muchIf you are gonna do all of this. Just run Proxmox on your Nucs, and set up VMs, and just containerize, even clustering.
Yeah, this is what I do - all containers with Ansible to manage it all. I would not recommend containerizing HASS though.
Well, since you’re going rackmount, bite the bullet and grab some enterprise gear for your VMs and containers. I run a HPE DL380 G10, and you can get them fairly inexpensively. The biggest cost driver in them on the grey market is RAM. Theyre surprisingly efficient for home use and will last forever. I have some G5’s that I ran for about 7 years and even though they sit on a warehouse rack in storage these days, they still run perfectly fine.
For my NAS and SAN, I run a Supermicro 847 Chassis, which is 36 LFF bay, with an X11 mobo running TrueNAS Scale. This setup allows me to create multiple large arrays, for NAS I have an SMB share that stores all my media for Plex, another array thats an iSCSI SAN feeding the VMWare stack, and yet another for local backups, all from one box with plenty of room for expansion.
Even with cloud backup services, its good to keep a local copy of everything live, and a local backup, so you can always find a need for more storage, good to have plenty of room to grow from the beginning.
Many ways to go about setting up shop. Some design considerations are gonna be do you want just enough to run the home, or do you want significant space beyond that to truly lab and play with tech? Server platforms will run VMWare, Nutanix, ProxMox far better than a desktop platform will, and are worth the bit of power consumption increase. I prefer the two box approach, separating compute from storage, because as much as I like the HPE DL platform, for home use I dont wanna be locked into buying HP branded disks any time I want to add storage. With the TrueNAS box I can add whatever disk I want and either expose it directly to the network, or add it as another LUN to the hypervisor datastore.
Rack gear is designed to move a lot of air. Ideally they need to be in their own closet away from people as much as possible, not only for the noise, but for the fact that people create dust and servers will suck that dust in and coat everything inside with it. To keep your gear running well, keep it away from people
As for network and security, you said youre looking at Unifi - Ubiquiti has a decent ecosystem for the average prosumer. As long as youre not planning to expose services to the internet you should be fine with that gear. If youre wanting a more robust network security solution, youd want to look into Firewalla, pfSense, OPNsense, or perhaps SonicWall
Thank you very much for your answer
I think I’m going to decide for a dual Nuc or miniPc configuration to run both VMs and Docker containers and then build a storage box with TRUENAS, what I’m not clear is what Hardware to use for this box, I want something relatively cheap since I’m only going to use it as storage and RAID, all the other processes will use the miniPC capabilities.
Could you advise me what hardware to use for this?
Thank you very much
First, Id make sure you have data lines setup. Get some PVC in the walls, and set yourself up to run data lines to every room.
I’d personally grab a NUC or 2, or honestly the NAB6 mini pc. Make them a Proxmox server, virtualize your apps in containers, or inside VMs. Getting 2 to 3 will enable High Availability for maintence.
I’d then build atleast 1 TrueNAS box, for storage. You can get 2 and create high availability here too. Additionally, you’ll want set of drives for backups of your TrueNAS server (the 2nd TrueNAS box isn’t a backup, it’s a redundant drive, very diff). That said, you could use the 2nd TrueNAS as a backup, until you have money to spring for a backup.
You’ll want a good router, you can run this on Proxmox, or just get separate hardware. Personally I’d get bare metal separate router. Than get a few switches, you’ll want 1 for PoE for your cameras, and 1 with 2.5 high networking, and youll want them all to have 10 gig, so they can communicate with each other quickly. (You don’t want a file transfer from 1 TrueNAS to the 2nd TrueNAS, to hog all your bandwidth between your switches, throttling your network speeds.). You’ll then want some Access Points that connect to your switches, over PoE, for wifi, Ubiquiti is really good here.
Thank you very much for your answer
I find this option quite interesting but I don’t understand the final configuration.
It would be to have two NAB6 mini PCs, I have seen them on Amazon and they are good machines. To those two machines install Proxmox and make them high availability.
And then to that add a box with Truenas for storage. This is what I see a bit more complicated. Can you advise me something to build that does not go too much price?
Only with the miniPc the budget would go to 900€, I currently have a synology ds220+ (that I plan to sell), with 2 4TB hard drives.
I would migrate those two disks to that machine that I would build with TrueNas or Unraid.
Could you recommend me a not very expensive hardware to build this box?
Thank you very much and best regards
It would be to have two NAB6 mini PCs, I have seen them on Amazon and they are good machines. To those two machines install Proxmox and make them high availability.
Yea, but they won’t be High Availability unless you have 3. Proxmox assigns HA Dynamically, meaning the machines vote. So you need a odd number. BUT, a cluster of 2 should be fine. Migrate the VMs over, to power down and perform maintence.
And then to that add a box with Truenas for storage. This is what I see a bit more complicated. Can you advise me something to build that does not go too much price?
I really like the n5105 nas boards, and the jxxxxx nas boards. I went with n51505. Basically what “Wolfgang” did on YouTube. It’s more than powerful enough, perhaps overkill. But the benefit is it’s a lot of sata ports, on a mini it’s board, which is rare. You might find a better setup, I’m still planning this section out.
Only with the miniPc the budget would go to 900€, I currently have a synology ds220+ (that I plan to sell), with 2 4TB hard drives.
You could just do what I did initially. I just copied Wolfgang’s build. N5105 nas board, a nas case (I used the fractal node, in his video), and put 32gb of ram (overkill). And a psu with a 500gb nvme. You can install TrueNAS on here. Run everything on here, media server, containers, etc. set your drives to ZFS. Then when you want to expand, you can get the NAB6 or something different…
You need to plan for what you intend to do. The setup I recommended is for like many VMs, for home labbing enterprise software to learn it. In addition to home server stuff, like media, are, vault, cloud, immich, etc. even a few windows and Linux VMs. It’s A LOT. You can simplify it. You can even run proxmox on the n5105. And just set up a ceph ZFS storage pool.
few things… is plex serving your home mostly? mine doesn’t transcode much at all unless it goes across the internet. I haven’t done much with Jellyfin yet so I can’t comment but my Plex server has moved from bare metal to, VM (fat and LXC) in proxmox, docker on bare metal, and lately docker running in a VM on my proxmox. The Plex server needs very little resources except for transcoding. Passing a GPU through proxmox to VM running docker with plex is working well.
Home assistant needs very little computer power and runs fine on a pi so anything can really run HA.
I use TrueNAS scale as my disk storage… both bare metal and inside proxmox as a VM.
Frigate and Blue Iris are next on my list this winter so I can’t comment.
Basically I’ve moved to a single HP DL360 gen9 with dual Xeon 2850v4 (28c/56t) and 128gb DDR… cost was $150 plus storage… this runs all my VMs at 150w and it’s rock solid. Previously I was using low power consumer devices but these 10 year old servers can be found fairly cheap and have redundancy and high quality built in.
Long story short I had a commodity power supply fail in my desktop and I could buy a server with dual power supplies for less money than a used replacement ATX PSU.
Food for thought but I’m happy I made the switch to enterprise grade equipment over consumer.
Thank you very much for your answer
Currently I do run Plex only for myself in Local, but I plan to start sharing it with some of my family members who live abroad. So there could be 4 simultaneous playback in 4k.
I also plan to have a house quite domotized with many devices so Home Assistant is going to need good memory and CPU so it won’t be too short.
Thank you very much
for context my plex has 5 people at home, 3 teens + 2 adults, I also have about a half dozen remote family and friends that use it. I run plex in docker without a GPU for transcoding and I can stream 3+ users with ease… a GPU would be better but I’m not there yet. Honestly plex is not that resource hungry except for transcoding, I’ve been testing plex lately and for me there is 0 difference between docker in a VM and bare metal.
As for home assistant I have it running over 70 wifi devices and sensors, controlling almost every light, my HVAC system 100% in both my house and garage, timers, notifications, power monitoring with solar and EV charging, etc… and it runs on a VM with 2 cpu cores and 4gb of memory and 8gb HDD. It takes almost nothing to run.
My docker server is ubuntu 22.04 in a VM with 8 cores and 16gb ram and I just doubled both of those for testing plex transcoding performance… I might go back to 4 & 8 but I have the resources so I’ll probably leave it.
I also run TrueNas in a VM with 4c/16gb ram attached to a dedicated HBA with 4x4tb drives for media. This also runs perfectly fine.
Honestly I ran all that on a i5-6500 with 32gb of ram and dual 128 SDD for boot until my PSU died and this new server was the cheaper option. With the server I can spin up VMs for testing and playing…
if you want to go big with resources go for it… couldn’t hurt. But honestly windows gobbles resources, Linux not so much… my only concern now is that I have a single point of failure with that server but it’s far more robust than any consumer grade tech and I have backups.