SW architecture for home server

[Jihays9]

I'm fairly new here and would like to get some feedback from the community on how to best approach what I'd like my server to do and the power consumption impact. I've got a solar with batteries and every kWh of those batteries is quite expensive, therefore I want to minimize the consumption of everything that runs 24/7.

I'll start first by the functionalities, I'd like to have:
-plex server
-some form of disk array for storage, kinda like a NAS (laptop backups, plex media and surveillance recording). I'm a bit lost here I'll admit.
-zoneminder to record surveillance cameras, alerts, etc
-home assistant, this is has the least priority

Now, all this doesn't need to run on the same physical machine, if that means lower overall power consumption. I've been reading in the forum that having each of the above virtualized in separate containers or VMs off the same server will end up with higher power consumption because you still have to power all 8/10/14 or whatever number of cores the server cpu/s have.

Should I have dedicated raids for the nvr and rest of data (and plex media) to be able to spin down the data array when not in use? This assuming the nvr will be recording 24/7.

Regarding the software structure, if virtualized, I had in mind running Proxmox. Creating one or two raids with TrueNas, however I read that ZFS has rather frequent data scrubs that will prevent the raid to spin off? So I'm not sure how to deal with that, what are the options here? Then having sorted the storage, I'd create a VM with Proxmox to run Plex and another for ZoneMinder.

 

[oneplane]

I think you can do this with just two systems, optionally with just one:

1. Run plex, zone minder and HA as containers
2. Store their state on the NAS, or if the performance doesn't track, use something like iSCSI

You can do all of this on a 2-bay Synology NAS (just pop two 10TB+ drives in it) and call it done, but if you want to learn and expand in the future, you can use TrueNAS Scale on 'standard' hardware for this instead.

If you then want to expand on that even more, i.e. run virtual machines, you can indeed opt for Proxmox. There are two main options:

1. Let Proxmox handle everything, use MD RAID 10 with LVM, host the NAS as a VM and host something like Portainer as a VM
2. Divide & Conquer: give Proxmox some disks and have a secondary controller and some disks and pass those through to a TrueNAS VM, use ZFS there for NAS purposes.

ZFS gives you better integrity, but the downside is that you get some write amplifications if you run a second filesystem on top of say a ZVOL. This is generally not all that bad and your hardware is likely going to be pretty old by the time that starts to degrade your storage anyway.

If you have a lot of cash to spend, there are even more options, but I haven't seen a budget, space or power constraint in your post.

 

[Jihays9]

I think you can do this with just two systems, optionally with just one:

1. Run plex, zone minder and HA as containers
2. Store their state on the NAS, or if the performance doesn't track, use something like iSCSI

You can do all of this on a 2-bay Synology NAS (just pop two 10TB+ drives in it) and call it done, but if you want to learn and expand in the future, you can use TrueNAS Scale on 'standard' hardware for this instead.

If you then want to expand on that even more, i.e. run virtual machines, you can indeed opt for Proxmox. There are two main options:

1. Let Proxmox handle everything, use MD RAID 10 with LVM, host the NAS as a VM and host something like Portainer as a VM
2. Divide & Conquer: give Proxmox some disks and have a secondary controller and some disks and pass those through to a TrueNAS VM, use ZFS there for NAS purposes.

ZFS gives you better integrity, but the downside is that you get some write amplifications if you run a second filesystem on top of say a ZVOL. This is generally not all that bad and your hardware is likely going to be pretty old by the time that starts to degrade your storage anyway.

If you have a lot of cash to spend, there are even more options, but I haven't seen a budget, space or power constraint in your post.

I've got a basic 2-bay Synology NAS 220j, but it gets easily overwhelmed if Plex needs transcoding or if it's updating its metdata library.

Anything idling at 10-15W would be ideal, 20W acceptable. My current budget is somewhere between 400-500€. You can find a "decent" server on this site for 450-500€. I started out with the idea of using old cheap enterprise hardware but now I'm starting to realize that maybe buying some used tower server that's newer and more power efficient might be a better option.

Space isn't a constraint, I have an empty 24U rack, but yet again, maybe a tower server with several HDDs might be a better option overall despite the fact that won't make use of the 19" rack...

 

[Jihays9]

1. Let Proxmox handle everything, use MD RAID 10 with LVM, host the NAS as a VM and host something like Portainer as a VM

Will I be able to spin down disks in this setup? I'm afraid I wouldn't if the raid is the same one the ip cameras are recording to.

2. Divide & Conquer: give Proxmox some disks and have a secondary controller and some disks and pass those through to a TrueNAS VM, use ZFS there for NAS purposes.

This option seems more flexible, but also more complex. Is Proxmox able to shutdown or keep in a low power state the VMs that are not being used? kind of like when my NAS is not being accessed and goes into sleep mode.

Would you suggest a specific Xeon model? I had in mind something like a 2640 v4 or gamer cpu like an i7 9700k that has plenty of horsepower and is rated as very efficient.