The New Guy to Homelabs based on linux

[DCJamison]

So, I have finally decided to set up a home lab with one of two identical computers that were donated to me, consisting of an i7 960 CPU, I believe room for eight sata drives, some sort of gigabyte motherboard"333" with a RAID controller that I'm not sure I've figured out how to turn off yet, and 24 GB of ram.

Thanks to Microsoft's increasingly hostile(to me) decisions starting back as far as Microsoft TechNet subscriptions being canceled and before that, their sales support programs, to more recently the requirements of TPM 2.0 and secure boot on my hardware that wouldn't need replaced as far as I'm concerned to upgrade to Windows 11. Not to mention the increase in cost for Xbox game pass. I honestly feel like Microsoft is intentionally sabotaging themselves at this point. It seems like every year I spend less and less money with Microsoft due to their decisions now they're not getting any more of my money, and more importantly nearly none of my time will be going to Microsoft. (Except for work since the company I work for is Microsoft centric)

I've tried setting up four different OS's at this point, those being proxmox, trunas which is the first one I got to work, open media vault, and Zima OS. Initially proxmox and Zima OS would not install, which at this point I relegate to an issue with drivers as I pulled out the g-force 8400 card that was initially in the system and replaced it with a 6200 and then all of a sudden proxmox would install. I have a plethora of external USB drives, at least 3 14 TB and two 8 terabyte Western digitals. I also have a crap ton of smaller mechanical hard drives 256 or 512 gigabyte.

my Windows 10 setup with an i-4770 and at this point a GTX 1060 6 GB model currently runs everything in my house, ranging from a Plex server to all of my steam games and retro emulation. I currently use moonlight to connect my onnTV streaming devices for gaming and all of the rooms in the house (sunroom, living room, bedroom) .

My first need for this home lab is to move my Plex server off of my Windows setup.
The data for the Plex setup I don't feel I need to back up nor have redundancy or resiliency for, so just a bunch of drives and I'm wondering how to set that up properly it's one of the few things I couldn't find about setting up drives for proxmox and the fact that I haven't ever set up drives in proxmox before.

So now I have questions:
I have proxmark set up on a 2 TB drive, how exactly should I install Plex in proxmox? am I required to use the CLI to do this, is everything very CLI based? based on my hardware, and my intentions to move Plex off windows first, have I made a good or a bad choice in using proxmox?

Is there a way that I can set up one of these 14 TB drives in Proxmox, move files to it from one of the other 14 terabyte drives on my Windows system then add that drive from the windows to proxmox, and then reference both of those 14 terabyte drives on proxmox as the same drive or am I making this harder on myself than it needs to be?

 

[jdancer]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I use to run a media server under Windows but the constant patching kept breaking my instance.

Migrated over to Arch Linux and mounted the NTFS drive read only under Linux and copied over the media to a ext4 filesystem. This obviously took awhile.

These days, I use Proxmox LXC and there is a Plex LXC script available at https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=plex I do NOT use Plex since I use the *Arr LXC scripts to manage my media. I do use Jellyfin LXC for hardware transcoding for one-off's.

I use ZFS (provides checking-summing [data & metadata], compression, snapshots) on CMR SATA drives. I am guessing your 14TB drives are SMR which will NOT play nice with ZFS primarily due to resilvering. You'll need to confirm if your 14TB drives are CMR or SMR. If SMR, you'll need to use another filesystem.

So, the workflow for me is: Proxmox -> LXC -> ZFS Pool -> CMR SATA drives

I do run the LXC as privileged since it is a home server and it's much easier to setup UID/GID mappings.

 

[odhiambo]

It's not easy to figure out everything you've said. It's a long story that makes me go floating.
Let's say this:
1. Get one of the 14TB drives off its external casing and install it on the machine you want to run Proxmox on.
2. Move the assignments from lvm-local to local storage. Delete lvm-local. Expand local to take up all the space.
3. Install Plex as a container on Proxmox and enable root login. This will help in #4 below
4. Once it's running and you've created your media folder, use WinSCP to move your media into Plex into their respective folders.

To install Plex, you just need to use the Proxmox webUI, access the shell on the node and from there you run the command that installs Plex. It's a copy/paste thing so you don't need to learn too much Linuxism
Find the command here: https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=plex&category=Media+&+Streaming
You can assign the Plex container a static IP on your LAN and enable root login via SSH. You can easily do this during the installation by selecting the Advanced Mode when the script is running.
Once it's running, you will be able to SCP using WinSCP to move your media files.
WinSCP will help you move the files into the 14TB in Proxmox.
After you've moved all the files into Proxmox, you can install the disk into the Proxmox machine and use it as additional storage.
There are many ways to do that. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNS_JoHFhg
It will help you decide on how to add the additional disks into Proxmox.

HTH

 

[LuisRowe]

It's not easy to figure out everything you've said. It's a long story that makes me go floating.
Let's say this:
1. Get one of the 14TB drives off its external casing and install it on the machine you want to run Proxmox on.
2. Move the assignments from lvm-local to local storage. Delete lvm-local. Expand local to take up all the space.
3. Install Plex as a container on Proxmox and enable root login. This will help in #4 below
4. Once it's running and you've created your media folder, use WinSCP to move your media into Plex into their respective folders.

To install Plex, you just need to use the Proxmox webUI, access the shell on the node and from there you run the command that installs Plex. It's a copy/paste thing so you don't need to learn too much Linuxism
Find the command here: https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=plex&category=Media+&+Streaming
You can assign the Plex container a static IP on your LAN and enable root login via SSH. You can easily do this during the installation by selecting the Advanced Mode when the script is running.
Once it's running, you will be able to SCP using WinSCP to move your media files.
WinSCP will help you move the files into the 14TB in Proxmox.
After you've moved all the files into Proxmox, you can install the disk into the Proxmox machine and use it as additional storage.
There are many ways to do that. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNS_JoHFhg geometry dash scratch
It will help you decide on how to add the additional disks into Proxmox.

HTH

My NFS storage is where I keep my media vault. Since almost all of it will be used by Jellyfin, I decided to pass the entire HBA controller through to the VM to eliminate any network protocols on top. I then built the ZFS pool and array directly inside the VM that hosts all the relevant containers: one large ZFS pool on the 18TB bulk drives and a smaller mirrored pool on two drives to store metadata and thumbnails, ensuring snappy browsing. From there, I can simply map the NFS share on this VM to other VMs as needed while achieving the best possible performance, even with multiple streaming clients running simultaneously.

 

[Johannes S]

My NFS storage is where I keep my media vault. Since almost all of it will be used by Jellyfin, I decided to pass the entire HBA controller through to the VM to eliminate any network protocols on top.

How are you doing your backups? The integrated backup features of ProxmoxVE won't save anything on the HBA-attached storage so you need another solution for that.

To install Plex, you just need to use the Proxmox webUI, access the shell on the node and from there you run the command that installs Plex. It's a copy/paste thing so you don't need to learn too much Linuxism

if you don't want to learn Linuxism you shouldn't use ProxmoxVE and you should never ever run a script from the Internet as root without understanding how it works first. If you want to do self-hosting without learning system administration (valid usecase!), then you shouldn't use ProxmoxVE but a NAS OS of your preference with support for VMs and docker (often called Apps) e.G. UnRAID or TrueNAS Scale. OpenMediaVault would also work for this and needs less resources but is a little bit more envolved to setup.

Recommending these scripts to beginners is bad advice since they setup systems in non-supported (removing nag-screen and thus messing up the web ui if an update change to much things) or non-recommended (installing docker-containers inside lxc which breaks from time to time after upgrades) way. This is fine if you know how to fix things if something goes wrong but novices usually neither have the skills nor the interest to waste their free time with that.

@DCJamison What is the reason why you went with ProxmoxVE? If you are actually not interested in learning virtualization or Linux administration (that's fine, I don't like doing to much server housekeeping in my free time too. I just happen to do that for my living, so I automated most of the annoying stuff in my homelab ) and just want to have an less-annoying alternative to Windows for your self-hosted services, something like UnRAID, OpenMediaVault or TrueNAS Scale might fit you needs better. They are all basically NAS operating systems which can be installed on any hardware which fits their requirements (OMV even runs on raspberry PIS and is (like ProxmoxVE) basically Debian and very flexible, TrueNAS and unRAID need a bit more resources but have also a more polished UI) which also allows running virtual machines and docker containers (you will need to install Plugins for that on OpenMediaVault). Imho for most homeusers they fit their needs better than ProxmoxVE.