Hi. Hopefully all you technology gurus can help as working with my servers and such is far from my first job. I have a media rack which is smaller than standard rack (450mm (17 3/4") wide, 450mm (17 3/4") deep and 25U high). I’m looking to add a virtualization server – either xcp-ng or proxmox to run VMs. Was thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 64GB to 128GB of RAM however specs could be variable depending on price. I have a separate Free NAS system with 10G card. The server is for home use and not for business. Budget is variable however probably looking more at used system I’m guessing. Anyone with any recommendations in terms of equipment or systems I should be working with? My only limited experience with Supermicro Mobos as this is what is in my NAS system. I’m not sure a 10Gb system is imperative since its a home server for Plex/Nextcloud/typical home run systems.
Hello. I am in search o knowledge to. I also am upgrading my NAS this month.
So I am using Supermicro Server CSE-829U 2x 6C Xeon E5-2620 v3 2,4GHz 64GB 12xLFF with 4 rj45 10Gb, but only one plugged in, and 12 WD efzx 4Tb arranged in 2xz1 array without any ssd. I am booting from 2 ssd.
My next build will be a cheap Chinese case 24bay (hope there will be no problems with the backplane), the rest is metal so I am not warried, I will not use redundant PSU since I will have spare PSU laying around (like all IT guys) and by the end of the year I will upgrade my home to off grid 30Kwh LFP battery an 24Kw 3 phase (3x8Kw) invertor and some solar panels with grid backup in case my solar will not produce. (I have heat pump and electric car so I use the power)
As for parts I will go for these:
cpu: EPYC 7303P (single core variant as it is cheaper)
mb: Supermicro MBD-H12SSL-I-O
cooler: Supermicro SNK-P0064AP4
ram: 8x32Gb DDR4 ECC 3200Mhz
hba: LSI 9305-24i (an older model with no support for nvme, but I use mainly HDD now, and I want opinions on ssd/nvme configurations from you, also I have plenty of PCI-E to play around for storage)
nic: AOC-STGF-i2S-O 2xSFP+ and I will link to the switch via DAC cable.
hdd: are not important for now, will port my 12x WD 4TB and add 4x20TB Seagate more
Hope this will help you.
Now I want opinions from you how to install all. I have played 1 year with proxmox. It work’s until it is not working anymore and I do not know where to start with it. Maybe I misconfigured things maybe that is suppose to be. So I dumped it for TrueNAS’s KVM version of virtualization.
So my use cases are:
I run a home assistant on a PI4 to monitor my power consumption no other automatizations → will move on the new server
I have an ubuntu 22.04LTS as a VM in TrueNAS now with LAMP stack that is running a Laravel app and is using the TrueNAS share for the files via a NFS share
I have a syncthing app to backup one remote computer
I have 2 friends that backup theirs TrueNAS’s to me
I want to install a Wazuh server to play around with logs (just to learn more).
The question is install/learn xcp-ng, install/learn proxmox or let TrueNAS as it is and move the VM’s to ssd/nvme and backup daily to HDD
For Plex, do you plan on doing a lot of 4k transcodes? This will determine requirements as to the server capabilities as you would most likely need a GPU. Most servers cpu’s are not optimized for transcoding.
Proxmox has been rock solid for me. I assume the same for xcp-ng.