WWYD - Brand new Unraid Plex and VM server, 2-3k budget

[Fatefree]

Hi guys, I've put my main PC to work far too long and I've got a new house that's ready for a new rack mounted server. I have ubiquiti network stuff already in place.

This is going to be a combo NAS, Plex media server with 5-10 concurrent 1080p streams, and other Docker containers for software development, home automation, game servers and whatever else life brings. I prefer some overkill because it's fun.

The budget is 2-3k ish but that includes storage, I'm hoping for at least 80 TB but I'm happy to hold off on all of that and at least get 40 to start, including a parity drive and SSD cache. I can be patient for drive sales.

I've researched a lot and was originally looking at the Reddit homelab recommendations of used enterprise equipment like the Dell r720xd, but it does seem like a lot of those recommended builds are a few years old so I'm open to newer hardware as well. What would you do if you had a clean slate?

 

[ajs]

Do you pay for power? I'd consider a 2600v3 platform, prices are starting to fall for this generation hardware. I just bought a supermicro X10SRH-CF board for $150, and a xeon 2660v3 for $95. I see 2670v3's for $125 on ebay. DDR4 is falling as well, can easily find rdimm's for $32/16G. Look into grabbing a used supermicro chassis, cse-825, 836 or 846. Otherwise get yourself a nice tower with a lot of 3.5" bays (something like a define or phanteks case)

You could go dual CPU, but I'd say that is a bit unnecessary. I'm actually moving away from a dual 2650v2 setup since it sits mostly unused and just eats up idle power.

Also, I'd go 10TB or larger for drive capacity, unless you want to buy 9 4TB reds from me (thats another discussion).

 

[IamSpartacus]

When you say

5-10 concurrent 1080p streams

Are these direct play/streams are transcodes because that makes a huge difference in what hardware you need. If transcodes are you considering using a GPU for hardware accelerated transcoding?

 

[Fatefree]

To answer the first poster, yes I have to pay for power but I wasn't overly concerned about it unless I really need to be.

And drives I agree, at least 10 TB or maybe a 14TB parity drive so I don't have to swap that out later. I might as well start with just 2 drives and add them over the year to get different batches.

As for the streams they will probably be transcoded, they are friends and family and I don't know if they even have the bandwidth for direct. This is a worst case scenario though and I won't expose 4k. I had no plans for the GPU since I don't think it would be necessary if I can go a little overboard on the cores.

I do want the processing power for the streams and game servers and any other home automation tasks I can think of.

I saw this nice article which seems to have a lot in common, but it's a year old and I don't know what's changed since then:

unRAID Server Build — SPX Labs

 

[IamSpartacus]

The reason to consider a GPU is that for relatively inexpensive (sub $100) you can get a GPU to support up to 14 transcodes and thus you can focus your CPU selection on the rest of your workloads.

You can get a sense of what GPUs can support how many transcodes here.

You can also get some sense of different Unraid Plex/VM server builds by looking at my build log here.