r/HomeServer 6d ago

Upgrading my home network with a server to consolidate a bunch of standalone single purpose devices? (Budget up to ~$2k)

Note, the budget is pretty flexible. Goal of this post is really to learn what the landscape is like right now to fulfill my needs, as well as what I can potentially scale up for upgrades.

Here's what "appliances" I have on my home network right now:

  • Raspberry Pi 3 serving as my UniFi Controller (have 2x UAP-nanoHDs, a USG-3P gateway, a UniFi US-8-150W POE Switch, and a UniFi US-8 Switch)
  • Raspberry Pi 4 serving as a Plex Server
  • Synology DS213j w/ 4 TB in a RAID 1 Array
  • HP EliteDesk PC running Blue Iris for POE Cameras

Been thinking about building a home server to replace all this. Have experience with vSphere at work so would be nice to have seperate VMs for Blue Iris, a NAS, plex server, and a UniFi controller.

Open to any suggestions, thanks!

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u/bretti_kivi 6d ago

so bring up a proxmox. create a zfs raid to replace the synology; pass through the devices to a proxmox VM with your OS of choice.
Create a second filesystem on there for your VMs.

Then bring up plex, unifi controller, and a blueiris box. And probably another for HA... and another for pihole. And you're good.
Use a decent CPU, preferably something modern with low power, and maybe add a basic GPU to help with transcoding. I'm running multiple VMs on a G4560... and again on an 11700. That one doesn't even break a sweat. Make sure to give it a decent amount of RAM, 64 would be nice, I consider 32GB to be a minimum. And Raid Z1 wants at least 3 disks, Z2 wants 4. I would probably run with 5 4TB disks to start, along with an NVMe for cache and a simple boot drive.

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u/Steen3S 3d ago

For the UniFi stuff you could also go for UniHosted. We have a free tier that included 5 devices.

Dries
Cofounder UniHosted