I am looking to build a full home lab finally after lots of little scavenged self built computer rigs over the years have finally failed or not worked well together.
I have very entry level knowledge, live in QLD Australia and wanted to know if anyone could recommend anything at all to help guide me through setting up Proxmox, dockers, photo and data backups, Plex or similar home media player “for myself and family”.
I love technology and geeking out over monitoring or trying to optimize my home network to reduce adds and maintain anonymity where possible.
I will use it to run virtual dedicated servers for games for my kids, myself and friends to play on as well.
ANY help or suggestions or point in the right direction would be MUCH apprecaited.
if there was a service where someone would help or guide me on this as well I’m happy to pay for someone’s time.
Once I know what i need or would best use based on the above then i can place the order to buy the HL 15. but i think buying it and then asking for help to set it up would be the wrong way to do it ?
There are any number of videos on Youtube walking through the setup of all the applications you mentioned. 45Homelab has a Youtube channel, but the explanations there aren’t always the clearest. I wouldn’t discourage you from watching or reading tutorials and such to get your bearings, but they aren’t really needed for determining what to order.
I assume from the comment “self built computer rigs over the years have finally failed or not worked well together” that you are looking for a prebuilt system, not to build your own again.
One question I would have is about the amount of storage you need and growth rate, and maybe any existing HDDs you expect to place in the unit. With the size of hard drives these days, do you really need an HL15, or would an HL8 suffice? Can you quantify “photo and data backups” and “home media”? The HL15 is positioned as storage-first, in a way, but the tone of your message seems more around compute–VMs, containers, virtualization, services–than wanting huge amounts of storage for Linux ISOs.
In any case–HL15 or HL8–there isn’t much to decide on a prebuilt; just CPU and RAM mostly. There’s some stuff on the periphery I guess–do you want rack rails? or an SSD carrier card?
For Plex, depending on your source and target resolutions and encoding you might want a discrete GPU for transcoding since the systems offered by 45HL are mostly AMD, not Intel, based so don’t include Intel Quicksync.
Do you have any existing hardware you expect to reuse from the old rigs? RAM prices are crazy these days. If you already have some ECC DDR4 that will keep your costs down on the HL15. If not, one plus of the HL15 is that it has 8 RAM slots, so you could fill it with 8 GB sticks (total 64 GB) or 16 GB sticks (128 GB) and probably have sufficient RAM for your use case without breaking the bank. It looks like they want $528 for 2x 32GB now, which is 3x what I paid a year ago. But you could do 4x 16GB for about $173.
I have a an old, second hand Datto server that i bought from USA and 12 new x 14TB WD hdd that i never got to use after a lot spent on trying to get the system to work its motherboard was cracked from transport and the seller stopped responding. No one in australia that i have talked to over the past year has wanted to look at it or fix it. Always recommend to buy another one and leave this.
The computer backups and photos would be for myself and family. Possible extended family like brothers and sisters etc depending if i can split it up with permissions and enough backup redundancy or raid features. “Need to look into/understand this more”. I would expect about 5-20tb here depending on what i am able to move across from google photos and drop box currently.
The media server is where any spare space would grow. I would ideally like to really fill this out with dockers and other things “I’m not sure yet” that could auto download or keep library up to date for tv shows and movies.
Ram I have read and see is getting more expensive but to avoid having to re buy or upgrade in the future I’d prefer some more now.
I am looking at the 8x64gig ram option to have room to grow and run multiple deidcated game servers simultaneously.
The options that confuse me or im unsure if i should get or not are:
2-Slot M.2 NVMe Carrier Card?
7mm SSD to HDD Caddy
15mm SSD to HDD Caddy
6Bay SSD Bracket Kit
I don’t know if these are very niece and i will never need them. Or if the 2-Slot M.2 is good for expansion of NVME speed HDD and grab 2 x 4gb NVME ?
It’s too late now but I think the eBay Money Back Guarantee should have gotten your money back on the purchase. I assume your plan was to repurpose the hardware and load your own OS (Proxmox?) and not to use it as a Datto appliance with their OEM software. I don’t know a lot about those systems but it seems like they use standard (rebranded Dell or Supermicro?) hardware, so you could probably get a replacement motherboard. Repairing a cracked motherboard in today’s world of multi layer PCBs probably isn’t a thing. At a minimum you may be able to resell some of the components and recoup a bit of money.
12x 14 TB drives seem more than adequate for what you’ve described so far, and fit nicely in the HL15 with room to grow. I would do some reading or watching on ZFS if you have not already. Be sure you understand VDEVs, RAIDZ1/Z2, pros and cons of RAIDZ expansion. etc. And also how comfortable are you in Linux and at the Linux command line? You might want to include the 45Drives Houston UI alongside Proxmox, or add TrueNAS to the mix if you want to manage ZFS through a GUI.
For P2P backups for extended family there are different ways to do this, and it may depend some on what systems they are backing up form, but you would probably use something like Tailscale and an app like Kopia or Syncthing (with caveats) to store encrypted backups. You can also use ZFS replication if they are running a system that is running ZFS.
I don’t use it, but they talk about the *ARR stack to manage media libraries. Explicit how-tos on that might be a bit harder to find than other apps and containers because it can be misused. A bit of a legal gray area like tools for making backup copies of media you own (in the US at least).
8x 64GB (512 GB) seems like overkill to me for what you’ve described. And is about $4,800 USD if you get it from 45HL with the HL15. Personally I’d have a rough time swallowing that. A year ago it would have been something like $1,400. But I guess DDR4 is EOL now, so if you want to ensure you have a matched set (which might not be as important a thing for DDR4 @ 3200) you might have to pay the ransom.
These all relate to what type of SSDs you want to use in the system beyond the 1 TB boot drive that comes with the system installed on the motherboard. You may want SSDs for ZFS read and write caches (L2ARC, SLOG, metadata cache) and as the place you store and run VMs from for better performance. The latter three are just physical mounts/adapters. They are 3D prints and the STL files are publicly available. You can print them yourself if you have access to a 3D printer.
7mm SSD to HDD Caddy - Link
This just positions and holds a 7mm 2.5-in SSD (Consumer, SATA) in one of the HL15s HDD bays.
15mm SSD to HDD Caddy - Link
This just positions and holds a 15mm 2.5-in SSD (Enterprise, SAS) in one of the HL15s HDD bays.
6Bay SSD Bracket Kit - Link
This attaches inside the case above the IO shield and holds up to six 7mm 2.5-inch SSD drives. It’s just plastic, there is no backplane, so you need to hook up the power and data cables to all the drives yourself. If you try to actually use all six slots the drives are quite close together and getting the cables onto the drive connectors can be tricky.
2-Slot M.2 NVMe Carrier Card - Link
This allows you to put two m.2 NVMe cards into one PCIE slot. Note this is a PCIE 3 card but the ROMED8-2T motherboard has PCIE 4 slots, and that all (or almost all) of them can be bifurcated to x4x4x4x4. So that particular card will limit the SSDs you install to about 3500 MT/s and would lose 8 of the 16 lanes in a slot. These types of passive NVMe carrier cards are pretty common now. You might be better off getting one that is PCIE 4 at least if you want to use faster SSDs, and one that is 4-slot if you want it to be its own redundant pool. Something like this; https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CBYVG91Z/ref=sspa_dk_detail_right_aax_0
So what you do here also depends on what SSDs you want to reuse from the other rigs, if any. If you are starting fresh, I think most people now would recommend NVMe SSD over 2.5-inch SATA for its faster speeds. There is a small price premium, but it is probably worth it unless you are trying to load up many large capacity (eg, 8 TB+) drives.
