Help Reviewing My Server Setup?
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I'm interested in why you chose the i5 for the automation, rather than the video server?
I'm no expert, but things like transcoding (or even just re-encoding) take a lot of grunt, which it seems the i5 would be good for.
The i3 would be good for more constant, lower power tasks like automation.
At least, that's my thoughts, happy to be shown your reasoning..
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Thanks so much for the response! Server 1 has been running strong for quite a while with six cameras on Frigate and very little CPU usage. I do have a ZFS pool on Server 1– this is the first I'm hearing that it requires more resource overhead... Could you elaborate a bit?
6TB is just to start, and I fully intend to upgrade both RAM and storage as I need it.
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Thanks for the advice! I have local backups, but in looking to use more self-hosted services, I want an offsite backup in case, say, my house burns down. That way I don't lose all my photos, etc.
I've decided to forego a mail server– you're not the first to tell me it's very difficult to maintain and setup properly, ha!
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I'm not an expert, how many Raspberry Pi 4s does this translate to?
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I would put truenas on the NAS, also put a VM on truenas with 16-24G of RAM.
Create a kubernetes or docker swarm cluster with server 1 and the nas vm and just have everything as containers. This way you just have one resource pool, and the containers will be started wherever there are enough resources available. The containers will mount NFS shares from truenas which truenas will create automatically as ZFS datasets. ZFS supports snapshots.
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ZFS is an enterprise software RAID, and 1:1 RAM to TB is the minimum recommended requirement for a production server (e.g. enterprise implementations).
I've seen many users stating they have far far less than 1:1 without issues. I recall a r/DataHoarder user saying they have 100+ TB's and only 16 or 32GB RAM, which is not fully utilized, so it all depends on your usage profile and the size/scale of r/w ops occurring during peak periods.
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I personally would avoid LXC. That seems to be a hot take but in my experience it is better to run docker/podman in a few VMs.
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Cost wise? 1 or 2 /s
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The GPU should be the same for most Intel systems
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I wouldn't do that unless you have lots of money to blow on crazy hardware. Running separate virtual machines is very inefficient. Instead, run a few virtual machines with a few services in each. I would separate it out into classes based on the load and use case.
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Not everything plays nice in Docker, and there are plenty of those services that also don't need a full VM to operate. LXC is great for those edge cases. Otherwise I agree, a few VMs for various Docker stacks is the way to go.
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...really? I run most of my services in an LXC, and have for a while without issue.
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I had the i5 prior to getting a NAS, and use it for Frigate. The i3 is just what came with the NAS box.
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Maybe I'm doing it wrong then. I run LXC but has always been a much worse experience. Boot times are terrible and the controls that work for VMs don't work as well for LXC. You also can live transfer which is problematic for me.
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Instead, run a few virtual machines with a few services in each.
That's what I meant, I guess it wasn't very clear. When I say "stack", I mean multiple services.
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I'm also considering UnRaid instead of Proxmox for a NAS OS.
NAS just has no meaning anymore?
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Personally I would keep it simple and just run a separate NAS and run all your services in containers across the devices best suited to them. The i3 is not going to manage for Jellyfin while sharing those other services. I tried running it on an N100 and had to move it to a beefier machine.
If you mount a NAS storage for hosting the container data, you can move them between machines with minimal issues. Just make sure you run services using a docker-compose for them and keep them on the NAS.
You completely negate the need for VMs and their overhead, can still snapshot the machine if you run debian as the OS there is timeshift. Other distros have similar.
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Or just run them in containers and skip the need to run the VMs at all. You can do snapshots with Debian fine.
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All the services OP has listed run great in docker, excluding Frigate (not tested personally).
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I ran Jellyfin on a N100 for a while and it just couldn't cope despite being by itself on the machine. I mostly watch 4K h264 encoded stuff.
