Downsizing Upgrade - 3 into 2 (or 1)?

Steveocee · 1 Aug 2022 at 22:41

Hi all,
I've been staying back at my mothers lately for some work stuff and have been streaming from my plex box at home, anything native is fine but when it needs to transcode, CPU is hitting 100% and I'm probably not using my kit as effectively as I should. I'd like to try and move from the 3 boxes I currently have at home, ideally into 1 but that makes me wince a little on redundancy but I'll talk you through what I have below and hopefully you can help me with moving forwards....

Box 1 - Main home unit - Fractal Node 804 - i7 2600K & 32GB DDR3 RAM - OS is ESXi 6.7 with a quad Gb Nic ethernet card - Storage is mixture of drives explained below. VM1, 2&3, 4 and 5 each have their own Gb port uplinked into my switch.
VM 1 - Plex server - 4c/4t - SSD1 although no media stored on this, Plex is pointed at Box 2 and mounts storage over LAN.
VM 2 - CCTV - UniFi Video 4c/4t - Has it's own 2TB WD Purple, is ok but if I go to look at any footage it doesn't like scrubbing.
VM 3 - mFi controller - 2c/2t - Runs an old Ubuntu image on SSD2 - serves a purpose.
VM 4 - Torrent box - 2c/2t - Has it's own 250GB HDD, used to be a 2TB but that failed.
VM 5 - PiHole - 2c/2t - SSD2 and is used regularly by my kids devices.

Box 2 - HP N54L 16GB RAM - SSD for boot and 4TB WD Red for storage, runs Ubuntu server, is almost exclusively a file server. Incrememental back up via rsync to Box 3 daily.

Box 3 - HP N54L 16GB RAM - 3x3TB WD RED and 1x3TB WD Green, runs Unraid and is also "just" a file server, nothing directly reads from this, is my "emergency backup" box.

Plex mostly serves to Amazon firesticks on the LAN, most content is 1080p that I get. Recently gotten "good" internet so may stream more when I'm out and staying out.
File servers mostly house downloaded content, nothing too horrendous if it was lost, lots of baby pics of the kids (hence the crazy filestore and backup so as to try not and lose any).

I would like to try and swing as much into cloud as I can however some things can't co-exist on the same box (unifi-video and mfi for example) so I kind of need separate box capability.

Any help would be really greatfully received here, my previous thinking was ECC memory for file servers and then something a bit quicker for the doing which it has done pretty well I think but I'd like to look at upgrading soon for faster kit that can handle more demand, starting to get 2 TV's sreaming same time now and throw in me being away that won't help.
Would like to cloud base a lot more as well so as ot have less running in the house as well (spin a box down at £10 per month and spend £5 on cloud is fine).

Finally - I need simple, when I started nerding out I had 1 child and 1 on the way. I now have 5 and 1 on the way so I can't sit for hours setting up and tweaking like I used to, I need stuff to work well and quickly,

BongoHunter · 2 Aug 2022 at 18:05

I would look to build a single box with a great storage array as you main server, then have a teeny tiny NUC type device to run whatever can't coexist on the main box, everything else including backups I would stick in the cloud (e.g backups).

You'll want enough PCIE slots to add enough NICS and storage controllers. You don't have that much storage in the current machines though so you may not need the extra storage controller (maybe a 4 disk raid 10 array if your sticking with ESX could do it?).

An 8 core Ryzen with 32GB of RAM (though some Ryzen boards can take 128 if you wanted more) should be more than enough for all the above and save you a boat load of space and power.

Regarding your very last point about not having a lot of time (know those feels as have a 1 year old). For your OS look at unraid if doing your own build - or look at a 4 bay plus Qnap device (they do some super powerful ones with plenty of RAM/Cores/NIC ports) but only if your feeling flush - on both unraid and Qnap (and probably Synology devices?) Deploying VMs and containers is all GUI driven and easy.

Steveocee · 6 Aug 2022 at 09:18

I've been trying to read into it for a few days and it seems that unraid has just grown in popularity since I bought a basic license for my backup box. I'm currently thinking about upgrading my license to a Plus and then using my unraid to spin up most applications into 1 big machine with some cloud use thrown in.

Does anybody know what ESXi is like with DIY builds at the moment? As much as unraid would be an easy answer for me, I'm pretty used to using ESXi or am I living in the past.

BongoHunter · 7 Aug 2022 at 01:07

ESXi is fine at the moment - just make sure your hardware is on the compatibility list (you may have to run an older version for support with certain storage containers and NICs if you are using older ex-enterprise components) - or hack about about to get your hardware working on the lastest release.

The issue with VMWare right now is that they are going through an acquisition with Broadcom. No one know what Broadcom might do (they've done crazy things with previous acquisitions) - so the future is a bit more uncertain at the moment. Though the ESXi 7 EOL date is far away (for the moment): https://lifecycle.vmware.com/#/

For home use - I've found Linux KVM to perform well, and docker is great, most stuff can run as a container rather than a full fat VM these days. We use KVM at work to cut out VMWare licencing costs and performance is good - but manageability is not as easy when you've got hundreds or thousands of machines.

Proxmox is quite cool too - we use it in our lab environments and might roll it into prod in the future as it's a very nice and stable setup.

Street · 10 Aug 2022 at 16:30

Steveocee said:
I've been trying to read into it for a few days and it seems that unraid has just grown in popularity since I bought a basic license for my backup box. I'm currently thinking about upgrading my license to a Plus and then using my unraid to spin up most applications into 1 big machine with some cloud use thrown in.

Does anybody know what ESXi is like with DIY builds at the moment? As much as unraid would be an easy answer for me, I'm pretty used to using ESXi or am I living in the past.

For running Plex etc, I'd definitely go Unraid over ESXi. I made the switch over a few years ago and haven't looked back. Using a 7th gen or newer Intel chip with iGPU it makes HW transcoding a doddle and it will eat anything you throw at it, Unraid will also spin down any hard drives not in use so can save on power. I think upgrade licenses are on offer at the moment as well!