Proxmox at home (for all needs)

[fabitaly67]

Hello,
I need some suggestions in order to setup a Proxmox server (host box) at home in order to have a unique box/device.
I need to replace several boxes and put all into the proxmox host box.
Existing Devices actually installed to eliminate/replace (virtualize):
- A Sophos SG/UTM Firewall SG135 (home licensed)
- A Raspbx (A Raspberry PBX with asterisk and Freepbx)
- A QNAP NAS (with SMB shares)
The new box will consist in a "best efficent, powerfull multi core PC and low consumption" box. Therefore I chosed and ordered/bought a Ryzen 9 5950x Processor (the most efficent 16cores CPU) and a Gigabyte AORUS ELITE X570s AX Mo.bo. and almost 32GB of RAM
I will plan to install a 4 port PCIe Ethernet card (HP NC346T) in order to have additional WAN and DMZ interfaces for the Firewall.
As Main Storage I will use a Intel 6,4TB 4618 (2x3,2 TB) configured in RAID0 by Proxmox.
For Storage/NAS and Backup/Syncronization I will use a pair of Seagate SATA RED 6TB Mechanical HDDs to plan to configure them in RAID1 (by software or hardware mo.bo. RAID) on Host box.
I will aspect to have max energy comsumption of the box of 200-250Watt, and I will try to put some special configuration on Motherboard in order to reduce CPU power (from 105W to 60W if it is possible).
For firewall and PBX I will configure a dual core VMs with 2-6 GB of RAM.
I'm testing Proxmox since 4 months (in a 56core dual platinum machine) but my main perplexity is how to recover the datas in the HDDs in case of demage of VMs or demage of Proxmox main configuration. For this reason I planning to find a suggestion or solution to format or configurate the HDDs in order to have the possibility to read them taking our (removing phisically) and then recover the datas.
The datas I need to have and and to be readable and recover removing the HDD (and install/connect them in a PC) are several files (DOC, DWG, XLS, MP3, ect) an of course the Backup images of the VMs I will create in the host box (some Windows 10/11 machines for tests). There will be a dynamic or planned backup/syncronization between the PCIe SSD and the HDDs (to find/suggest the tool to do it).
So I need to find a solution to keep and recover easily the datas on the HDDs that must be easily readable using some popular format (EXT/NTFS/FAT32) just simply removing those HDD (and connect them to any PC via SATA) from the host box in case of any hardware or software failures.
About to Backup/NAS I need some suggestion of some linux distros to permit to Backup, syncronize (file to file and/or other methods) of the datas stored in the SSD PCIe NVME card to the HDDs.
Any suggestion?
Thanks in advance for your opinions and suggestions.
FAB

 

[floh8]

A Sophos SG/UTM Firewall SG135 (home licensed)

is this a hardware applliance?

A QNAP NAS (with SMB shares)

normally, this is a hardware applliance?

How much data is on the qnap?

 

[fabitaly67]

Dear floh8,
Sophos UTM is of course an hardware appliance but Sophos put a disposal a similar appliance in "software version" where anybody (with proper home or commercial license) can install it in a different hardware (no-sophos hardware) o virtualize it .

Also QNAP NAS is an Hardware appliance, but in this case I will use one of the available distros (Truenas, Openmediavault, etc) with similar features.

Regards
FAB

 

[floh8]

As Main Storage I will use a Intel 6,4TB 4618 (2x3,2 TB) configured in RAID0 by Proxmox.

I think u will use Raid0 for performance reasons.

For Storage/NAS and Backup/Syncronization I will use a pair of Seagate SATA RED 6TB Mechanical HDDs to plan to configure them in RAID1 (by software or hardware mo.bo. RAID) on Host box.

Its stupid to have the Data and the Backup on the same device group.

For this reason I planning to find a suggestion or solution to format or configurate the HDDs in order to have the possibility to read them taking our (removing phisically) and then recover the datas.

If u use Virtualization than your data is normally in an separate container format. Therefor u cant take the disks and put them in an other pc. U need a restore process to access your data. Your backup tool mostly compress, archiv and sometimes deduplicate your data. You must firstly reverse this process to work with them.

There exist different ways to do backup for instance Proxmox shipped with a built in backup but that do only full and compressed backups. Search the internet there exist so many different solution according to your use case.