New home server: which device / specifications?

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Hi everybody,

I am considering a new computer as my home server. My initial thoughts were to buy the same one I use as my desktop pc (intel nuc, specs below), but perhaps this is not enough (or too much), so I was hoping to get some input on what to buy.

My current home server is a beelink (similar to intel nuc) with these specs

  • RAM 8GB
  • SDA 100GB (not enough!)
  • Intel Pentium Silver N5000 CPU @ 1.10Ghz
  • running debian 4.9.210
  • nothing connected / headless setup

Home Assistant runs fine on it, so do all the other services:

bare metal:

  • zigbee2mqtt
  • mosquitto server

dockerized

  • Home Assistant
  • Grocy
  • Dokuwiki
  • appdaemon
  • gitea
  • mary-tts
  • (another) mosquitto server
  • nginx
  • bookstack (currently replacing with dokuwiki)
  • mariadb
  • chronograph
  • influxdb
  • adb server
  • phpmyadmin
  • portainer

I have only about 2% disk space left, and memery is usually like this

Mem: 7.6GB total 2.1G used 1.2G free 53M shared 4.3 buff/cache 5.2G available
Swap: 7.8G total 41M used 7.8G free

top shows that my CPUs usually have a load avery between .5 and .64 (sometimes spiking up to 100% for a couple of seconds).

The home server definitely needs a new hdd/sdd for sure, but I was thinking of buying a completely new device, so that I could use the current home server as a test server, while all services that I need to run can be on the new device.

My desktop pc is an intel nuc i7

  • RAM 32GB
  • sdd 260GB
  • Intel Core i7-8809G CPU @ 3.10GHz
  • running 5.7.4-arch1-1
  • two monitors, keyboard, mouse, etc. connected

I am considering this very same model for the new home server; the only thing I am not really sure about is the graphics card, which is a Radeon RX Vega. I don’t know much about graphics cards, but I am pretty sure that I won’t need this card for running a headless home server. Is there some alternative with similar specs, but without a powerful graphics card that you can recommend (perhaps even from personal experience)?

Guess I should mention that I would even go for a small “actual” server (like, a rack unit); I have a small rack and got space for 1-2HE. But I wouldn’t know where to begin, and I am not sure about power consumption. Both the beelink and my intel nuc run at 100W; the servers I looked at all (HP Proliant, for example) have two times 750W, which is way too much, considering that I this is for personal use only, but has to run 24/7. I don’t want to spend 15 times as much on energy when running something like this.

However! If there is a decent rack server with > 32GB RAM, a fast processor, perhaps a system sdd and storage hdd(s), I would go for that. Otherwise, something like the intel nuc would be fine as well.

What do you use? What can you recommend? Thank you for your input :slight_smile:

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Hi, I will repeat what I just answered to a similar question.

Depending on your needs/situation, I would advice you to really take a look at Proxmox VE.

I discovered this when in search for an all in one solution for a NAS and a virtualization platform. I also had been looking at real, dedicated NAS devices but finally turned away from it because the lack of flexibility, hardware and software wise.

I have been running a bare metal virtualization server (ESXi), a Debian server long time ago, a windows server flavor, a desktop as server, USB drives connected to some system for network wide accessible storage, …
It’s less then 1 year that I’ve discovered Proxmox VE and I’m really enthusiastic about it: the advantage for me and over ESXi

  • it’s not as critical about hardware requirements since it’s built on Debian
  • free, open, fully functional and actively developed
  • no additional software needed to manage, it uses a webUI

I’m running it on a repurposed SFF system (3rd gen i3 2c/4t, 16Gig Ram) with currently 6 containers (one of them is HA) and 1 full Win-VM.
The flexibility with containers/VM’s to just add a new service to your network is just fantastic.

Regarding hardware: I was presented (for free) a Dell server with 2 Xeon cpu’s, lot’s of RAM and disks. Just because of noise, power usage and mainly because of overkill I thanked for it.
I think that there are a lot of home systems (both user systems as servers) which are over-dimensioned.

Nick

1 Like
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Thank you, Nick.

Regarding hardware, I don’t want to just run Home Assistant, but also those other services I had listed (and ressources left to add more of those). I forgot to list things such as syncthing and saving images from multiple cameras (for timelapse) via crontab, as well as backing everything up via rsync. I would much rather have an over-dimensioned system, just because it will allow me to add more services without having to assure that everything still runs smoothly. My NAS runs ttrss, nextcloud and some other dockerized services that I could as well host on the new home server instead of the NAS.

Reading your quoted text I assume that I should be good to go if I buy the same device that I am using for my desktop pc and have more than enough ressources for everything, correct?

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LXC containers use very few resources, that’s why I’m able to run all this very smooth with rather outdated specs and fairly modest amount of RAM.
Regarding your camera’s: in case you don’t know this solution, maybe it’s not bad to have a look at ZoneMinder to read up on hardware requirements for camera’s and maybe it’s a candidate for you.

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I have looked into ZoneMinder a couple of times. But I was not able to figure out what hardware I would need in order to run it smoothly with my current 14 cameras and resources left to add more if I need them.

The zoneminder subreddit provided some good advice, but while I am usually fine getting into software projects, I’m having a hard time picking hardware. So I could not find out what exact hardware setup I should/could buy for this. Btw., I am aware that about five of these cameras are overkill¹ and not needed, but if I install zoneminder and actually buy dedicated hardware for it, I’d prefer being able to use all of them.

¹ The outdoor cameras around my property do make sense, but I don’t really need things such as the octopi camera observing the 3d printer etc.; it is nice to have, though, and I already own it, so why get rid off it :smiley: