this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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One Server to Rule Them All: Seeking advice on consolidating my setup (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hi everyone,

I'd like to seek some advice on a proposed change of my home server setup that I'm considering.

Current setup:

  • Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian): with openHAB, Node-RED, Mosquitto, Grafana, InfluxDB, UniFi controller
  • Raspberry Pi 2 (Raspbian): with piHole, unbound, WireGuard
  • DS212 (DSM) as a NAS

Issues:

  1. High power consumption due to running three systems.
  2. Limited backups (currently only backing up configuration files).
  3. Occasional SD card corruptions (fortunately, backups have saved the day).
  4. The DS212 Web UI seems to get slower with each DSM update.

Proposed Solution: I've been considering consolidating everything onto one machine using a modern proxmox+Docker setup instead of running everything bare metal. Here's my idea after some research:

  • Get an ASRock N100-based mainboard with 32GB RAM, a 500GB NVME drive, and 2 SATA ports (for the two 2TB SATA drives from my Synology).
  • Use the NVME for Proxmox and create two VMs:
  1. VM for all the smart home/networking applications (migrated from the RPi4+RPi2), isolated into Docker containers.
  2. VM for NAS functionality (any suggestions for a NAS OS?), using the two SATA drives in a RAID 1 configuration.

Questions: I would greatly appreciate your advice on the following:

  • Does my proposed hardware configuration seem suitable for my needs? Anything better than the N100? Do I need 32GB?
  • What NAS OS would you recommend for the second VM (TrueNAS, OMV, anything else)?
  • Are there potential drawbacks or challenges I should be aware of with this new setup? I have the feeling I am over complicating things.
  • Any other thoughts or suggestions?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)
  1. Do you have numbers on power usage? Your spinning rust drives are using 5-10 watts each. It's likely that they're using more individually than both Pi's combined.
  2. This is fixable with more software
  3. Unfortunately a part of life with Raspberry Pi. Maybe consider swapping to an SSD?
  4. This is a 12 year old Synology. I empathize though, I'm running a DS416j I bought in 2015, so almost as old.

My suggestion would be to focus on getting a better Synology with an Intel chip that can run Docker. You'll start off being familiar with the base OS and can make your backups rock solid and you'll be able to run whatever you want with Docker. Assuming you can swing a 4 bay NAS you'll also have room for expansion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Thanks for your input.

ad 1) I have two 3.5 HDDs (Seagate IronWolf). But primarily used for backups from our PCs. While I don't have concrete measurements, I assume the NAS is idling more than 90% of the time.

ad 2+3) Not a big deal, but rather an inconvenience since I have to reinstall the base system and packages but can use the configuration backups. So this is a nice to have.

ad 4) Actually, I hadn't thought about this before. The main concern is that my NAS currently remains mostly idle. Running Docker containers might prevent it from idling, raising the question of whether I'd need to migrate to SSDs to reduce power consumption? This would double the migration costs (two 4TB SSDs for both the current data and the additional storage for Docker containers).