Homelab

Hey friend, you’re aiming for a setup very close to what I run. Some lessons from my fumbling:

• Get a NUC and install HASSOS on it for Home Assistant. Treat it like an appliance and leave it to do it’s thing.
• I run Frigate on a separate host with 2x Coral USB TPUs processing 5x 4K cameras. It sits at about 20% utilization.
• Check out Simply NUC and UCTRONICS for rack shelves for NUCs and Pis. If you have other random hubs you want to rack check out this Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Print3DSteve
• I highly recommend a NAS for media and other storage. I have a Synology RS819 and it’s solid for this, but I just bought a used Dell R720XD that I plan on loading up with drives and installing TrueNAS on. I’d check out used Synology options on eBay for your use case.

Given your low power consumption requirements, I’d probably look at something like this:

• 1x NUC for HASS
• 1x NUC with Coral TPU for Frigate + other apps
• 1-3x Pi4s or 5s for other random apps. I run mine using PoE hats to my UniFi gear.
• 1x Synology rack mount w/ 5400 RPM drives (lower power consumption).

If you want to do any AI/ML beyond Frigate, you’ll want a desktop GPU in the rack. I still haven’t found a good option here. I’ll likely get a rack case that works with desktop hardware and throw a 3090 into it.

First, Id make sure you have data lines setup. Get some PVC in the walls, and set yourself up to run data lines to every room.

I'd personally grab a NUC or 2, or honestly the NAB6 mini pc. Make them a Proxmox server, virtualize your apps in containers, or inside VMs. Getting 2 to 3 will enable High Availability for maintence.

I'd then build atleast 1 TrueNAS box, for storage. You can get 2 and create high availability here too. Additionally, you'll want set of drives for backups of your TrueNAS server (the 2nd TrueNAS box isn't a backup, it's a redundant drive, very diff). That said, you could use the 2nd TrueNAS as a backup, until you have money to spring for a backup.

You'll want a good router, you can run this on Proxmox, or just get separate hardware. Personally I'd get bare metal separate router. Than get a few switches, you'll want 1 for PoE for your cameras, and 1 with 2.5 high networking, and youll want them all to have 10 gig, so they can communicate with each other quickly. (You don't want a file transfer from 1 TrueNAS to the 2nd TrueNAS, to hog all your bandwidth between your switches, throttling your network speeds.). You'll then want some Access Points that connect to your switches, over PoE, for wifi, Ubiquiti is really good here.

few things... is plex serving your home mostly? mine doesn't transcode much at all unless it goes across the internet. I haven't done much with Jellyfin yet so I can't comment but my Plex server has moved from bare metal to, VM (fat and LXC) in proxmox, docker on bare metal, and lately docker running in a VM on my proxmox. The Plex server needs very little resources except for transcoding. Passing a GPU through proxmox to VM running docker with plex is working well.

Home assistant needs very little computer power and runs fine on a pi so anything can really run HA.

I use TrueNAS scale as my disk storage... both bare metal and inside proxmox as a VM.

Frigate and Blue Iris are next on my list this winter so I can't comment.

Basically I've moved to a single HP DL360 gen9 with dual Xeon 2850v4 (28c/56t) and 128gb DDR.. cost was $150 plus storage... this runs all my VMs at 150w and it's rock solid. Previously I was using low power consumer devices but these 10 year old servers can be found fairly cheap and have redundancy and high quality built in.

Long story short I had a commodity power supply fail in my desktop and I could buy a server with dual power supplies for less money than a used replacement ATX PSU.

Food for thought but I'm happy I made the switch to enterprise grade equipment over consumer.

Well, since you're going rackmount, bite the bullet and grab some enterprise gear for your VMs and containers. I run a HPE DL380 G10, and you can get them fairly inexpensively. The biggest cost driver in them on the grey market is RAM. Theyre surprisingly efficient for home use and will last forever. I have some G5's that I ran for about 7 years and even though they sit on a warehouse rack in storage these days, they still run perfectly fine.

For my NAS and SAN, I run a Supermicro 847 Chassis, which is 36 LFF bay, with an X11 mobo running TrueNAS Scale. This setup allows me to create multiple large arrays, for NAS I have an SMB share that stores all my media for Plex, another array thats an iSCSI SAN feeding the VMWare stack, and yet another for local backups, all from one box with plenty of room for expansion.

Even with cloud backup services, its good to keep a local copy of everything live, and a local backup, so you can always find a need for more storage, good to have plenty of room to grow from the beginning.

Many ways to go about setting up shop. Some design considerations are gonna be do you want just enough to run the home, or do you want significant space beyond that to truly lab and play with tech? Server platforms will run VMWare, Nutanix, ProxMox far better than a desktop platform will, and are worth the bit of power consumption increase. I prefer the two box approach, separating compute from storage, because as much as I like the HPE DL platform, for home use I dont wanna be locked into buying HP branded disks any time I want to add storage. With the TrueNAS box I can add whatever disk I want and either expose it directly to the network, or add it as another LUN to the hypervisor datastore.

Rack gear is designed to move a lot of air. Ideally they need to be in their own closet away from people as much as possible, not only for the noise, but for the fact that people create dust and servers will suck that dust in and coat everything inside with it. To keep your gear running well, keep it away from people

As for network and security, you said youre looking at Unifi - Ubiquiti has a decent ecosystem for the average prosumer. As long as youre not planning to expose services to the internet you should be fine with that gear. If youre wanting a more robust network security solution, youd want to look into Firewalla, pfSense, OPNsense, or perhaps SonicWall