I want to figure out the best way to turn my desktop into a NAS+Media Server+small home lab to migrate the AdGuard and HomeAssistant images I have running on a Pi4, but I would also like to be able to use it as a daily driver for small dev work and sporadic gaming.
It is a 10th gen i9 with 32GB DDR4 3200 with no dedicated gpu (I built it during lockdowns and didn’t want to spend so much ob GPUs)
What would be best? I was thinking NixOS but am unsure how friendly and easy to setup the NAS-side would be
Thanks!
Generally not a great idea to run everything from one machine. I would find an old box maybe first gen Ryzen or newer and find as much ddr4 as you can. But if you are saving money and using what you have…
Install Proxmox PE - Proxmox - Powerful open-source server solutions
This will be the host virtual server that will house all your virtual environments for main pc and other virtual servers.
For internet, Opnsense. Hardware passthrough the NIC to the VM for server isolation.
For NAS, I would go with TrueNAS Scale Community Edition because it’s very good and free. Hardware passthrough the hdds you’ll want to use to the VM.
You can create another VM for your local workstation use.
After that, you should be able to just work out the rest with some thoughts on how to manage your network stacks.
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Even thinking about the scenario above, you would need a dummy terminal with network connectivity to access the VM’s.
You could run a something like VMware on your OS, but there more overhead and any patch reboot would take down the entire thing.
Best thing you could do is to get a 2nd box with about 32 GB of RAM to build a NAS. Any processor would just about work with 4-8 threads. You could go the dummy terminal route, but the overhead experience might not be great.
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