Finished setting up 10Gb for my home network with PFSense on an old server with 6x10Gb ports, and a Mikrotik 4x SPF+ ports in switch mode. The home server is a Dell PE T630, with 8bay SAS RAID, and a 4bay NVME that I'll setup the OS on, Dual Xeon E5-2630v3, 128GB RAM. I originally thought I could do a software RAID for the NVME drives since the NVME card is just a pass through card and doesn't have any RAID options. Still a bit n00b with linux but have done a few setups of Ubuntu Server for NAS builds. I started looking at how to setup the storage and got interested in ZFS RAIDZ2 after setting up the PFSense firewall OS. Tried to get storage on the Dell T630 setup for RAIDZ2 to install Ubuntu Server 24.04, but I rally don't know the file system and boot structure well enough to get it working. It kinda seems like I'm barking up the wrong tree to even try this layout. So that has brought me here to consider Proxmox. Hoping some people can help me with a better storage layout for my case use, and help me determine if Proxmox is a better fit for me than a bare metal OS install. I setup a test build with a spare domain I have, and did a single drive install of Ubuntu Server, loaded LAMP, WP, Nextcloud, and was trying to setup Postfix, Dovecot, and Roundcube but got messed up trying to configure that. Have Webmin (I used this on my NAS builds and it helped me a bunch learning how things work), and considered starting with Virtualmin if I do go with a bare metal OS setup,as I also need to figure out user management and my small amount of experience with Webmin, I think, will make it easier to handle and setup the apps that will be accessible to the users. This is for a large family of users, and email may not work out for me for a while, but NC and WP will work good. There will be an open source IP camera setup coming to this system in the next year also. I'll use my old NAS, with a fresh OS install, as a backup for the PFSense firewall/router, and the T630 server OS. Have 4x 256GB M.2 consumer SSDs in the T630, but could drop a few bucks to improve the storage here; the 8bay SAS is going to get 10TB drives and will be zpool(s), not hardware RAID. This will be storage that is locally accessible too, not just for NC data. Was thinking of just doing a samba share as I've done with my NAS, but may look into another cross platform sharing tools.
In short, what would you do with this T630 with the priorities being:
Fast local file access of both media and backups
Nextcloud that shares access with at least the media files
Wordpress (nothing heavy going on with this for now, but maybe in the future)
Email (since this is a home internet connection, I may need to hold off on some of this, thus a lower priority)
IP camera hosting (not a priority this year)
NVME storage layout? Am I doing it the dumb way looking to setup redundance? Does it fail too boot if one drive fails even in raidz2? Should I buy bigger M.2s to setup caching for the spinning drives? Should this just be a server with Ubuntu and skip the hypervisor?
In short, what would you do with this T630 with the priorities being:
Fast local file access of both media and backups
Nextcloud that shares access with at least the media files
Wordpress (nothing heavy going on with this for now, but maybe in the future)
Email (since this is a home internet connection, I may need to hold off on some of this, thus a lower priority)
IP camera hosting (not a priority this year)
NVME storage layout? Am I doing it the dumb way looking to setup redundance? Does it fail too boot if one drive fails even in raidz2? Should I buy bigger M.2s to setup caching for the spinning drives? Should this just be a server with Ubuntu and skip the hypervisor?