Building a rack mounted proxmox server for my smart home

My new smart home runs Proxmox, on a rack mounted self built server. Check out how I researched what to buy, how I built it, how I installed Proxmox, and how I eventually installed Home Assistant on a Virtual Machine using Prox Mox.

Links:

Chapters:
00:00 - Why build a home server?
01:42 - Choosing a rack mounted server case
03:00 - Choosing components for my server
04:32 - Assembling my home server
05:24 - Choosing my home server operating system
07:41 - Installing Proxmox on my home server
10:21 - Configuring my hard drives for Proxmox storage
13:38 - Installing Home Assistant on Proxmox
15:31 - Bringing it all together and next steps

[EdoDijkgraaf]

Love it when someone honestly shares the stress I enjoy so much.

[tgndmel]

I thought the laundry comment/ network cabinet was hilarious, keep it coming and stand your ground!

[EdBrentnall]

I absolutely love your candour in this video. Not giving a shit about other people's complaints is a very valuable attitude! I'm intrigued by the choices you're making in your new home as you're doing a lot of the things I want to do, with similar considerations so I have fallen for the clickbait you set up in this video and can't wait for the next one! From one massive nerd to another, I salute you. 🤓

[rorylawson]

14:03 this made me laugh so much, I’d totally do the same thing as I think I’m hardcore then quickly realise I have no idea! But that’s what makes doing this sort of thing so much fun! Keep up the great work

[DodgeHooker]

In your video at 6.25 mark you say that a hypervisor (ProxMox) runs on the host system OS... In this case and as you depict with your video graphic, that is Incorrect. ProxMox is a Type 1 hypervisor and IS the actual OS that runs "bare metal" on the host. An example of a Type 2 hypervisor is VirtualBox, which DOES run on top of (within) the host OS (such as Windows or Linux).

[dorinxtg]

Great video, may I suggest few things? :)
1. Add another M.2 SSD, this time get the Optane 1600X (the 58GB size) and add it as a SLOG to your ZFS. Also, since you're using a whole SSD for proxmox, perhaps you should create on that SSD an additional partition and assign it as a cache for the ZFS. This will improve performance considerably on the VMs
2. Don't use "mkdir" for those sections that you created in the proxmox (around 13:00 on the video). Create ZFS Datasets. This will allows for a better usage of the ZFS storage, and you can also assign parameters for those Datasets for better performance.
3. The Intel fan - I strongly recommend replacing it with a low profile Noctua fan. It's not the cheapest option, but it works great, it's silent and it can operate great even if your machine using the CPU fully (100%) continuously.

Good luck and I'm glad that I've stumbled on your channel. Subscribing now.

[rjerez]

I been thinking of creating my own 2U server to run as my NAS replacement and also home assistant machine. Interesting that both you and Jeff just recently did this, must be a sign from the universe.

[SMLP]

I’m new to Proxmox but I have to say it has been great so far.

My favoured VM is a windows 10 for one of the kids to Remote Desktop into from her iPad so she can do her homework on without me having the buy her a new computer, been great so far.

[nitronaf]

I recently did something similar but i use a 3 tiny pc node cluster that has home asssistant, two pfsense vms in CARP, unifi network LXC and a portainer LXC. all three have mirrored 64gb OS drives and a mirrored 256gb drive for VM (I am looking into how to use this hardware better with a shared storage solution).
The networking side of things is done with VLANs.
I also made sure to only really use networkable solutions for my zigbee and BLE and hope that my current TUBEZB will be upgradable to broadcast thread. This stops your Home assistant from being tied to one node in particular due to hardware passthrough.
Doing it this way i now have high availability on my home assistant and seemless failover of my router. I can technically lose up to two nodes before anything will go offline.
I am looking to expand my cluster to 5 with the addition of two storage servers running unraid and a few more VM hardware-pass-through tied devices such as Plex (GPU).

[johnadams]

Bought a DL360 gen9 rack server with 64GB RAM, dual CPU for £105 off eBay!!! Amazing prices. Popped a few drives in, set up raid 5. Happy days!! A million miles from my pi 3 with SD card! LOL

[lawrencemanning]

The license on that software is an interesting flavour of open source: Affero GPL. Basically designed to equate offering the software as a service with distribution. So people modifying the software and offering products around that offering must give back their changes, which wouldn’t be a requirement under the regular GPL. Thought you might find it somewhat interesting. :)

Next time I’m building a VM/container host I’ll consider this one, cheers.

[adifoto]

Thanks for the videos. i live in Europe and find very hard to find smart switches that have good functionality and can be deemed. Americans have so many options. Will love to see what you find helpful.

[andymok]

I use Proxmox and it works very well. I personally am sick of hearing about containers. I have enough on my plate and learning docker is not on my list. That is just me. I ran HA on Proxmox for over 4 years and worked great. I run mqtt, node-red esphome and zigbee2mqtt each in their own LXC on Proxmox. They are a container, but none of the hair pulling setup of docker. Maybe raising the rack off the floor in case a a flood at least.

[JasGawera]

I'm glad you looked at the power usage. This is something I'm looking at more and more. I have an old hp microserver as my NAS with 4x4TB hard drives. This consumes 50W 24x7. My ha box is a small dell which is only 11W. I'm thinking about using the HA box with a 12TB USB drive and samba share. Then using the microserver as scheduled backup only so it isn't on all the time.

[KS-wrub]

Great video! I'm also new to Proxmox after 12+ years only running unRAID and Docker containers. Now I'm looking to run some services, like AdGuard, HA and virtualizing PFSense, on a small proxmox server so I'm not too dependent on keeping the big server running. Fun learning! 

I think the laundry room works great, as long as the rack is up on some 10 cm legs you shouldn't have to worry. ;)

Regarding the Intel CPU. In the B-roll showing the parts used @00:08, I see that it says 12400F on the box? I do believe that CPU doesn't have QSV, and I hope you've just gotten the wrong box.

[Rockwolf]

SSH’ing isn’t necessary. There is a shell console built right into the Proxmox gui. Copy and paste works there for Proxmox and LXC comtainers. For VM’s you need to SSH in.

Also why split your SSD’s? Install Proxmox as a ZFS mirror between the two. PVE uses about 6GB of space. That leaves you over 900gb for VM hard disks, container disks, isos and container templates. VM’s and containers can’t eat up the entire dish as they are provisioned with the max amount of space they can ever use when you create them.

As for running ZFS on those Barracuda’s? They are SMR drives and ZFS both hates and eats SMR drives for breakfast. You are going to get read errors that ZFS won’t be able to recover from, so please back up anything important over there.

Make the best use of your hardware.

[pjohnson]

no judgement co-locating a rack in the laundry. Space and companion approval are important considerations. Just try and make a point to clean it a few times a year.

[nagisupercell]

So cool. With the virtualization, it's possible that 2 people to use their own keyboard, monitor, mouse ... at the same time in same machine. (just for cool 😆)

[miketarbox]

Good for you. This is your project, everyone can piss off. Good video BTW

[FlaxTheSeedOne]

Instead of creating folders, you can also create datasets which allow you more flexebility in terms of settign qotas and creating and sending snapshots