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Help to set up HomeLab in a newly built house (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by hidi1992@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

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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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[–] Zeal514@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] hidi1992@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Zeal514@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

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.