My Homelab Setup

A couple of years ago I bought a pretty sweet computer from a friend of mine. It became my home server sitting below the TV in the living room. An i7-3770 with 16GB of RAM on a supermicro motherboard in a nice Zalman case. I threw a couple of HDDs I had laying around. Recently I’ve upped the RAM to 32GB. The configuration is now more or less maxed out. I could put a xeon processor and move to ECC ram but it would not bring me much. I am still running that computer as my server, but I made changes over time to the software setup I am running.

My setup included things like Plex for media streaming, Transmission for torrenting, Flexget for automation, and Syncthing for file synchronization. These services were all running on a single machine running Openmediavault, which is a fantastic open-source NAS operating system. That was running well, the “problems” came in a couple of different ways. When OMV released a new major release, they removed most of the plugins and said to use docker to set up the same thing. Which is fine. But I did not feel like moving the whole setup, so I kind of stayed on that setup waiting for better times to go through the whole configuration to have the same functionality. Also as I had one computer that I was depending on for some services I was not really up for experimenting with my running system.

So I was running like that for some time, not really having any motivation to change anything. In the meantime I moved apartments. Had all kinds of things happen like a global pandemic etc. That was until I figured out that proxmox VE is based on Debian and there are versions that are free to use. That was not obvious to me when I first ran into proxmox.

spajza

I installed proxmox ( on new hard disks keeping the old one if something hits the fan :-) ). As this is a big thing, the computer got a new name in sync with the theme I had until now, heads of defunct intelligence agencies, Schwanitz. Managed, in one session, to install the OS and install all services that have also been used by other people. After that I also managed to virtualize my two systems running on stand-alone rpi-s. Homeassistant and PiHole. That was great to reduce the power consumption of my home setup a bit. Also with homeassistant I was running into the edge of what rpi was able to do.

Schwanitz

One of the main benefits of virtualizing my home services with Proxmox is that it has given me a lot more flexibility. I can now easily spin up new VMs for testing or experimentation, and I have the option to snapshot my VMs and roll back any changes that might break something. I also have the ability to move VMs between physical hosts if I need to, which is something that would be much more difficult to do with physical hardware.

Overall, I’m really happy with my decision to virtualize my home services with Proxmox. It’s given me a lot more control and flexibility, and I’m excited to see what other services I can add to my setup in the future. If you’re considering virtualizing your home services, I highly recommend giving Proxmox a try.

Next steps:

Well other then upgrading the server, I think I am really close to a fully functional setup. I plan to replace the ISP router with a small computer running pfSense or OPNsense. I’ll keep trying different services to self host!