Hi all, so recently I decided that our little 2 bay qnap NAS wasn't cutting it anymore and it was time for an upgrade. I've since fallen down the rabbit hole of going from buying a bigger turnkey NAS to building a homelab with the plethora of old pc parts I have lying around (6 bay turnkeys are far too expensive for my budget).
I'm looking for input/ideas to make sure I'm on the right path and clear up a few things. To start with, the main thing I'm trying to achieve is to run Truenas and get my Plex server back up and running (although very tempted to move to jellyfin). However it'd also be nice to run a VM or two to get some game servers up for myself and my small friend group (valheim, enshrouded, windrose etc). I also need to be able to remote into the system to check and maintain things as I travel a lot for work and need to do this without creating an unsecure backdoor into my network/server (so vpn?).
The hardware I'm running is going to be this:
*i5-6600
*B250 ex mining motherboard (might have found an alternative that is better)
*16gb ddr4
*5 x 2tb SAS drives running though an HBA card (truenas storage)
*2 x 2tb SATA drives (Truenas storage)
*1 x 256gb SATA SSD (OS install drive)
*1 x 1tb SATA SSD (truenas cache drive)
*Might possibly throw in a GTX 1060 6gb for transcoding too (will move to jellyfin if I go down this route so I don't have to pay for plexpass)
*650w msi psu
Basically I'm struggling a little with my mind map of what runs what, and how to have my NAS storage separate to everything as well as network security which I very much don't know a lot about.
I was originally only just going to run Truenas and call it a day, but now I'm thinking of running proxmox, and either a VM or a container for truenas, whichever works better (if it can even run in a container?). Then another VM for Ubuntu to run valheim server etc (probably a third windows VM for the windrose server too, but not all at the same time). Then containers for the apps that do all the downloading of movies etc for me. Unless there's a better way to do this? I've just been recommended docker although some of what I've read is not to have it as your underlying OS in case of failures.
I'm very new to all this and still learning all the lingo, and have next to no experience with Linux except some very basic hiveos usage back in the day but am happy to sit down and learn (albeit slowly).
Hopefully I haven't missed anything, any help would be highly appreciated, thanks in advance 😊