I’m in the market for a nas or thinclient for these kinds of things, an upgrade for my RPi Home Assistant.
I’m stuck at hardware at the moment and think a cheap 2bay NAS is probably the way to go. My concern is that I won’t be able to run all the things on a NAS mainly because I’m clueless. This community talks in maths (as Radiohead say) so half the time I’m trying to decipher all the LXCs and other acronyms.
Anyway, I think I need to learn PROXMOX or Unraid so your comment has me interested.
My question to you is this: since your server is plugged in via ethernet, can you access the Windows VM via web interface? Or does it require a screen, keyboard, mouse, etc?
I think I’m gonna be running HA in a VM, along with Adguard and maybe LMS in docker containers, then probably a Windows VM for Arr and Plex. I assume all these things will have their own port but I’m just not 100% about the actual Windows VM
I run a couple of containers on my lenovo mini pc. I have proxmox installed on bare metal and then one VM for truenas, one for docker containers and one for home assistant OS.
For me the limiting factor is definitely RAM. I have 20GB (because the machine came with a 2x4GB configuration and I bought a single 16GB upgrade stick) and am constantly at ~98% utilization.
To be fair, about half of that is eaten up by TrueNAS alone due to ZFS.
The point I’m trying to make is basically make sure you can put enough RAM into your machine. Some NAS have soldered memory you won’t be able to upgrade. The CPU performance you need highly depends on what you want to do.
In my case the only CPU intensive task I have is media transcoding which can often be offloaded to dedicated bardware like intel quicksync. The only annoying exception is hardware transcoding of x265 media which is apparently only supported from intel 7th gen and upwards processors and I have a 6th gen i5… Or maybe I configured something wrong. No clue
Edit: I wrote that after reading the first half of your comment. Regarding connecting a screen, I think I had one connected once to set up proxmox. Afterwards I just log into the proxmox web interface. If required I can use that to get a GUI session of each VM as well.
I’d recommend building your own server rather than buying an off-the-shelf NAS. The NAS will have limited upgrade options - usually, if you want to make it more powerful in the future, you’ll have to buy a new one. If you build your own, you can freely upgrade it in the future - add more memory (RAM), make it faster by replacing the CPU with a better one, etc.
If you want a small one, the Asus Prime AP201 is a pretty nice (and affordable!) case.
I’m in the market for a nas or thinclient for these kinds of things, an upgrade for my RPi Home Assistant.
I’m stuck at hardware at the moment and think a cheap 2bay NAS is probably the way to go. My concern is that I won’t be able to run all the things on a NAS mainly because I’m clueless. This community talks in maths (as Radiohead say) so half the time I’m trying to decipher all the LXCs and other acronyms.
Anyway, I think I need to learn PROXMOX or Unraid so your comment has me interested.
My question to you is this: since your server is plugged in via ethernet, can you access the Windows VM via web interface? Or does it require a screen, keyboard, mouse, etc?
I think I’m gonna be running HA in a VM, along with Adguard and maybe LMS in docker containers, then probably a Windows VM for Arr and Plex. I assume all these things will have their own port but I’m just not 100% about the actual Windows VM
I run a couple of containers on my lenovo mini pc. I have proxmox installed on bare metal and then one VM for truenas, one for docker containers and one for home assistant OS.
For me the limiting factor is definitely RAM. I have 20GB (because the machine came with a 2x4GB configuration and I bought a single 16GB upgrade stick) and am constantly at ~98% utilization.
To be fair, about half of that is eaten up by TrueNAS alone due to ZFS.
The point I’m trying to make is basically make sure you can put enough RAM into your machine. Some NAS have soldered memory you won’t be able to upgrade. The CPU performance you need highly depends on what you want to do.
In my case the only CPU intensive task I have is media transcoding which can often be offloaded to dedicated bardware like intel quicksync. The only annoying exception is hardware transcoding of x265 media which is apparently only supported from intel 7th gen and upwards processors and I have a 6th gen i5… Or maybe I configured something wrong. No clue
Edit: I wrote that after reading the first half of your comment. Regarding connecting a screen, I think I had one connected once to set up proxmox. Afterwards I just log into the proxmox web interface. If required I can use that to get a GUI session of each VM as well.
Hey no you answered a bunch of questions I had there. So I’m looking for an i7 with lots of RAM. Thanks that’s excellent
I’d recommend building your own server rather than buying an off-the-shelf NAS. The NAS will have limited upgrade options - usually, if you want to make it more powerful in the future, you’ll have to buy a new one. If you build your own, you can freely upgrade it in the future - add more memory (RAM), make it faster by replacing the CPU with a better one, etc.
If you want a small one, the Asus Prime AP201 is a pretty nice (and affordable!) case.