Hi,
I current run a Synology NAS DS1813+ which is quite old now but has served me well for file sharing purposes, DHCP, DNS and a few other services. I would like to continue using this for file storage but I want to run more services (Plex / Jellyfin, Git Server, 1 or more windows VM, pihole and maybe some more).
This is where I need some advice regarding a good approach to achieve what I want.
With electric prices being very expensive where I live I want to keep my power usage as low as possible. With this in mind my attention has turned to an Intel NUC / MiniPC.
I am out of touch with hardware these days and trying to get up to speed with what my options are. From the research I have done, the AMD 6800HS looks to tick all the boxes for me - 35w TDP, 8 core / 16 thread, Base clock of 3.2GHz, PCIe 4.0 and iGPU with RDNA2 architecture, the issue is I cant find any MiniPC’s with this chip in it yet.
Question 1 - Are AMD’s as well supported in linux as intel ? If running VM’s, docker or other Virtual technologies, will AMD give more trouble than an Intel equivalent. From what I have read, Jellyfin DOES support transcoding with AMD iGPU’s whereas Plex is a bit patchy requiring a maintained docker image with AMD support patched in.
Assuming the hardware side is sorted, my attention turns to how I set this up and getting things running.
I have been researching several Hypervisors such as Proxmox, XCP-NG and Harvester. From what I have seen Proxmox appears to do what I want.
So lets say I now have a MiniPC setup with Proxmox ready to run VMs, my attention then turns to storage.
Question 2 - Do I store the VM’s on the local NVMe, or do I setup an iSCSI LUN to store the VM’s?
It makes sense to me to store the VMs on the local NVMe due to its high speed and me only having 1Gbps LAN. Any data (such as videos accessed by Plex / Jellyfin) I assume would be accessed via an NFS share mounted to the guest VM?
Assuming this is all set up and running correctly with VM’s on the local NVMe, my attention then turns to backup.
Question 3 - Is there any way to backup the entire instance of proxmox (within proxmox, and not using something like Clonezilla), or only individual VMs ?
If for example I upgraded the NVMe in the future, is there any way to restore the complete proxmox installation from a backup, or would I have to reinstall proxmox, and then restore the individual VMs?
Assuming I get this far and everything is working as expected, if I find in the future I want to run more services and the Mini PC doesnt have the horsepower, can I add another MiniPC as an additional ‘node’ and install more VMs, potentially even moving VMs from one node to the other ?
Apologies for all the questions, but ive been thinking about this for some time now and would like to start pushing ahead, but and am unsure if my approach is correct.
Thanks in advance!