I wanted some help with a homelab server I am in the beginning stages of designing. I am looking for a flexible and scalable media and cloud system for home use, and I thought this community would be a good place to source feedback and recommendations before taking any real next steps! I really want to check that I am approaching the architecture correctly and not making any bad assumptions. I am open to all feedback, so please let me know what you think!
I already run a simple home server and I have typical homelab FOSS apps, such as jellyfin, navidrome and audiobookshelf, but I am also interested in migrating away from cloud storage using nextcloud, immich, etc. In an ideal world, this setup would also allow me to leave windows on my main machine and use a windows vm for business related work that can’t be done on Linux. I will likely be the one primarily using the services, however I could expect up to 10 - 20 users eventually.

High level setup is with two machines:

• Proxmox Server
• TrueNAS Scale server
  • JBOD with either 90 bay or 45 bay storage
• 10G switch

This might be a stupid setup right off the bat, which is why I wanted to discuss it with you all! I have read a ton about using TrueNAS as a WM within Proxmox, but I just like the idea of different machines handling different tasks. The idea here would be to set up the TrueNAS server so it can be optimized for managing the storage pool to allow for easy growth. While the Proxmox server can handle all the VMs and connecting users, with higher IO, etc.

TrueNAS System Specs:

• AMD ryzen CPU and motherboard
• 64 or 128GB ram
• Mirror 500GB M.2 NVMe OS Drives
• GPU if necessary, but hopefully not needed
• Dual 10gb pcie card if the motherboard doesnt already come with them
• An hba for the JBOD something like the LSI SAS 9305-16e
• SLOG and L2ARC as necessary?

JBOD enclosure

• While I am interested in a 90-bay enclosure, I would only realistically be starting with two vdevs which is why I think a 45 bay enclosure wouldn’t be an issue.
• Im tentatively planning for an 11 wide Raidz2 vdev configuration. This would hopefully scale to 8 vdevs with 2 hot spares or 4 vdevs with 1 hot spare.
• All drives would be HDDs

Proxmox Server Specs:

I am less familiar with the specs I will need for a good Proxmox server, but here is what I am thinking.

• AMD epyc and motherboard if I can get my hands on a less expensive one. Otherwise I was thinking a higher end AMD ryzen cpu
• 128 or 256GB ram
• Mirror 500GB M.2 NVMe OS Drives
• Somewhere between 2 and 8 TBs of SSD storage. Depending on the number of drives, I think this would be a single drive, mirror or raidz1.
  • This storage will be used for all the vm configuration and storage, except for something like Nextcloud where the main storage will go onto the TrueNAS mount.
  • I would also use this for temporal storage such as downloading a file before transferring it to the TrueNAS mount.
• A dedicated GPU primarily for transcoding media streams, but also for testing and experimenting with different AI models.
• Dual 10gb pcie card

Questions:

• I know Proxmox can do zfs right out of the box so I know I don’t need the TrueNAS server, but splitting it this way just seems more flexible. Is this a realistic setup or would it just be better to let Proxmox do everything?
  • Does anyone have experience creating NFS shares in TrueNAS for mounting in Proxmox? I would be interested in thoughts on performance, and stability among any other insights.
• Do any of the system specs I listed seem out of line? Where and how do you think things should be scaled up or down?
• If I ever did expand to a second JBOD shelf, assuming the first one was full first, is it be possible to create new vdevs that spanned across the shelfs without losing data?
• Is SLOG and/or L2ARC necessary for this setup? What capacity and configuration would be best?
• What else have I missed?

Lastly, a quick blurb:

I have been building PCs for a while and undertook building a home server a few years ago. I loved the experience of learning Linux (the server is running Ubuntu), picking up docker, and learning more about the FOSS community has been a joy! Part of this project is to learn along the way but also have a setup that I can build towards over time! Proxmox, TrueNAS and zfs would all be new to me so I really see it as an opportunity to explore. I want a solid media and cloud server setup, while also giving myself the freedom to explore new operating systems and general hypervisor functionality.

And as long as I'm asking ... nginx or Apache (or Caddy or whatever else you think is best).

I'm hosting a few web sites and services, but currently, everything is "out there" on VPSes. I want to bring it all in-house, go back to the old days of actually hosting websites out of my living room.

Towards that end, I am gradually upgrading and overhauling all the sites and services, fixing long-standing issues and inefficiencies in the config files, merging servers, etc.

I have never learned Docker. I've started to several times, worked with it a bit on a job once, used it a bit here and there; so I'm not clueless, but it would be a learning curve.

Also, I'm running one main service (Nextcloud) that officially, only supports Apache -- there absolutely are nginx setup guidelines and tutorials and such, but that's all unofficial, experimental setups.

And I'm running another major service (Synapse), on nginx.

And I want to merge the servers, and choose one web server to host both of them, and I don't know which way to go there.

Thanks for any feedback.

Hey, gamer tilderinos. I've followed our Minecraft server threads but I've never participated.

Any interest in a Tildes Satisfactory server?

Do you think that game lends itself well to a shared server for this scale of people?

Hello Tildes!

I've been trying out a lot of open-source apps these past few months but I've always hosted them on a VPS. It's been great and educational so far. However, I started considering to host my very own server on-prem so that my data is absolutely physically with me and nowhere else.

With that short intro, I'd like to say I'm in the market for a home server. I can install OS's, docker containers, etc. And that's how I managed to install Jellyfin, Immich, Paperless, Portainer, etc on my VPS right now.

What out-of-the-box miniPC can be good for someone dipping their toes in the home server scene? I feel like I might need the storage to be extendable somehow? And it must be able to stream music and video through Jellyfin.

The choices in YouTube videos are overwhelming that I keep jumping from saying "ooh I'll get that" to "oh wait maybe I'll get that other one".

I also am not very handy in terms of hardware so I would prefer something out-of-the-box (if possible). Maybe a max budget of 500? But around 400 euros would be preferred. (Edit: In EU also, if possible)

Thanks for reading! Hope to hear from you guys!