So I finally finished gathering the hardware for my first real homelab. I currently have a pi that I run nginx, searxng, and pihole, but I’m looking to move to something more hefty. I’ll probably leave pihole and nginx on the pi. I’m wanting to set up plex to host things for home use as well as a way to store photos, Documents, etc locally. Ideally my friends and I play games like valheim and icarus and I would like to be able to use a vm or container to host game servers when needed.
My hardware currently consists of an amd 4650g pro, 16gig ddr4, amd a520 mobo and 2 1tb m2s.
My question is I’m considering setting up proxmox for this but I wanted to see advice before I go to far. Is there a more preferred option? I’m not too hung up on cost but ideally I don’t want anything to run through like a host page off my network or something. And I would like something that will allow me to expand storage since 2tb isn’t really a lot
Prefer containers over VMs when possible, which is most of the time. You'd stretch your hardware much further than using VMs. I'm running 20 containers at the moment on an 1800X and I use the same machine as a gaming desktop. It's vary rare I can tell that there are resource-hungry services running while I'm actively using it. I can be playing CS2 while several Plex streams are being serviced. Even with some transcoding.
I generally do prefer containers. But I'll be sure to stick to them as much as possible. Thanks for the tips!