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

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

few things... is plex serving your home mostly? mine doesn't transcode much at all unless it goes across the internet. I haven't done much with Jellyfin yet so I can't comment but my Plex server has moved from bare metal to, VM (fat and LXC) in proxmox, docker on bare metal, and lately docker running in a VM on my proxmox. The Plex server needs very little resources except for transcoding. Passing a GPU through proxmox to VM running docker with plex is working well.

Home assistant needs very little computer power and runs fine on a pi so anything can really run HA.

I use TrueNAS scale as my disk storage... both bare metal and inside proxmox as a VM.

Frigate and Blue Iris are next on my list this winter so I can't comment.

Basically I've moved to a single HP DL360 gen9 with dual Xeon 2850v4 (28c/56t) and 128gb DDR.. cost was $150 plus storage... this runs all my VMs at 150w and it's rock solid. Previously I was using low power consumer devices but these 10 year old servers can be found fairly cheap and have redundancy and high quality built in.

Long story short I had a commodity power supply fail in my desktop and I could buy a server with dual power supplies for less money than a used replacement ATX PSU.

Food for thought but I'm happy I made the switch to enterprise grade equipment over consumer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thank you very much for your answer

Currently I do run Plex only for myself in Local, but I plan to start sharing it with some of my family members who live abroad. So there could be 4 simultaneous playback in 4k.

I also plan to have a house quite domotized with many devices so Home Assistant is going to need good memory and CPU so it won't be too short.

Thank you very much

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

for context my plex has 5 people at home, 3 teens + 2 adults, I also have about a half dozen remote family and friends that use it. I run plex in docker without a GPU for transcoding and I can stream 3+ users with ease... a GPU would be better but I'm not there yet. Honestly plex is not that resource hungry except for transcoding, I've been testing plex lately and for me there is 0 difference between docker in a VM and bare metal.

As for home assistant I have it running over 70 wifi devices and sensors, controlling almost every light, my HVAC system 100% in both my house and garage, timers, notifications, power monitoring with solar and EV charging, etc... and it runs on a VM with 2 cpu cores and 4gb of memory and 8gb HDD. It takes almost nothing to run.

My docker server is ubuntu 22.04 in a VM with 8 cores and 16gb ram and I just doubled both of those for testing plex transcoding performance... I might go back to 4 & 8 but I have the resources so I'll probably leave it.

I also run TrueNas in a VM with 4c/16gb ram attached to a dedicated HBA with 4x4tb drives for media. This also runs perfectly fine.

Honestly I ran all that on a i5-6500 with 32gb of ram and dual 128 SDD for boot until my PSU died and this new server was the cheaper option. With the server I can spin up VMs for testing and playing...

if you want to go big with resources go for it... couldn't hurt. But honestly windows gobbles resources, Linux not so much.... my only concern now is that I have a single point of failure with that server but it's far more robust than any consumer grade tech and I have backups.