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:
- High power consumption due to running three systems.
- Limited backups (currently only backing up configuration files).
- Occasional SD card corruptions (fortunately, backups have saved the day).
- 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:
- VM for all the smart home/networking applications (migrated from the RPi4+RPi2), isolated into Docker containers.
- 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?
Two Pi and a 1,6Ghz single core ARM NAS…
This is around 20 watts idle and ~30 watts under load…nowhere near “high consumption”. The N100 is just around 15 watts idle and more capable systems like a Ryzen 5 7600x idle at 25 watts. So lets say you swap everything to a N100 single system. This will maybe save you around 5 watts while idle which means ~40kw/h savings per year.
You do not have the computing power to run VM’s/applications that could utilize 32GB RAM. Everything you mentioned could be run on a machine just at 4GB RAM. The only reason could be the use of ZFS and a lot of disks and TB’s of space. You should be fine aiming at 16GB RAM.
In terms of OS. I use Unraid because its very easy to use and does not require you to have HDDs spun up like with traditional RAID. Saves me a lot of energy and wear on my drives. It is also capable of running Docker containers and various VMs.
Thanks for the input. I initially came across lower power consumption estimates for the N100, approximately 5-7W, but I now re-checked and indeed some people report idling at around 13-15W. I guess a lot depends on the peripherals and the quality of the PSU. But such a slight improvement wouldn’t be worth the hassle