Home Server PC build with Proxmox - cheap, quiet, powerful 💪

if you're following me on instagram or twitter you know that i share some behind-the-scenes materials about future projects for example my home lab server and i just came up with this idea because i needed a new server in my home lab where i can just run some virtual machines and have a reliable network attached storage for all of my files videos and so on and of course i also want to explain some of the decisions i made and what you should consider if you want to build your own do-it-yourself home lab server with something like proxmox [Music] if you want to build your own homelab server there are many different options you can choose from and it's all based on your personal requirements so for example do you just need to have a backup solution or a storage solution for all your files in your network then maybe a nas solution is a good option or maybe you need to run many concurrent virtual machines or want to get access to professional server equipment then build an entire home lab server rack is maybe also a good idea and in the past i've already worked with vmware east xi and microsoft hyper-v in professional companies but i wasn't really afraid of testing and trying out something completely new and therefore i've asked you guys on twitter and discord what do you guys want to see what should i install on that and how you are running your own home live servers and yeah because proxvox was by far the most requested topic i just went with that but first things first before we start talking about the operating system let's also talk about hardware and requirements because i know that a lot of you guys want to see professional server equipment and a lot of you guys are already running such systems at home but let me explain why i have decided to not go with a professional server equipment but instead build my own do-it-yourself home lab server so let's take a look at this [Music] so my old server i got is a dell power ht410 and this is based on professional server equipment you usually see in small and medium-sized offices or even small data centers and those old server models like the dell power edge series and the hp proline series as well are really good servers you can put in the separate room or in your basement where you can build an entire home server rack and you will find a lot of great deals on ebay where you can get those older server models very very cheap and you get a lot of computing power for a very fair amount of money but in my opinion those professional servers have two major disadvantages the first one is they are extremely loud because of the professional fans and the second one is because i usually come with two power supplies and especially the older models are not very efficient the power consumption of these servers is really really high and in fact the old dell power hd 410 that i got costs me three times my own do-it-yourself home server when we talk about pure power consumption and because i also don't have a separate room in fact i only have this small room here where i work and where i create my videos i cannot go with rack server because those servers are just too loud so i just wanted to get rid of this old server i wanted to get something new something efficient that is quiet but still powerful and not too expensive and because i'm not afraid of building my own pc in fact i've built my very first own pc together with my father when i was 12. this sounded like a fun and exciting project and i also had some little help because my three years old son he came to me and wanted to help me building this pc and yeah this was a very very cool moment i really enjoyed building this and yeah it made a lot of fun and of course you're also very proud if you've completed this and if you've built your own home lab server completely from scratch but of course you also need to make some decisions you need to pick your parts that you put in your server very carefully and let me give you some recommendations what you should consider when building your own do-it-yourself home lab server so the first question you should ask yourself is which processor should you get should it be an intel or an amd cpu and how many cores and threats should it have and well i cannot really tell you because it's really depending on your own personal requirements so if you just need that server to store some files and data on that you probably don't need a very expensive and powerful cpu but in my case because i wanted to test and try out many current virtual machines i needed a cpu that can handle all this stuff and what i can recommend you is a six core 12 fret cpu from either amd or intel because those cpus don't cost too much you can get some very very great deals on those mid-range cpus but they also have enough power and some of the modern generations are very very efficient also in terms of power consumption and this is an intel core i5 10 400 processor so this is a very great mid-range cpu comes with 6 cores and 12 frets and up to a 4.3 gigahertz clock speed so this is definitely powerful enough to run many concurrent virtual machines but it's also a very good deal it's not too expensive on the amd side we have the md ryzen 5 3600 it's not the latest generation not on both of these cpus but i always tend to buy one generation older because usually they are better deals but these cpus are still very modern very efficient and very very good so when we compare the benchmarks between the intel and the amd cpu you can see that those cpus are very even right they almost cost nearly the same and you can see the intel cpu is slightly faster than the amd while the amd is slightly cheaper so now when we talk about amd versus intel a lot of people will tell you well it probably is just about fanboyism if you are liking amd or intel more but i can tell you well the decision between amd and intel is not really that easy especially when we talk about home server builds so the first argument for an intel cpu should be that it has an internal graphics chip installed so if you just want to build a server and you you really don't have any graphical accelerated workflows running on there you usually don't want to add an additional graphics card into your server but with amd you need to do that because the amd cpu doesn't have an internal graphics chip like the intel one and you need to buy at least a very cheap graphics card to just make this server working i can recommend something like this here the msi gt710 which is really cheap it costs around 40 50 and you should consider that because you can save that money when you go with an intel cpu now amd on the other side has also some advantages the first advantage would be that it has a very great stock fan so the stock fan that comes with the amd ryzen cpus that are just incredibly good and i really love to do that you really don't need to upgrade your cpu fan when you go with an amd cpu but it also has another advantage that is very specific to the storage systems and servers and we will come back to this later so once you've chosen your cpu you should also pick up an appropriate mainboard that supports your cpu so you really should take care that it has the correct socket because especially intel likes to change their socket with nearly every generation of new cpus so you also need to upgrade your mainboard every time you upgrade your cpu on amd this is a little bit different because amd currently only has the am4 socket but you need to take care that not every mainboard generation supports every cpu generation and model so there are different chipsets around and because i've used the amd ryzen 3600 i've decided to go with this main board here the asrock a520m pro 4. so this supports amd am4 sockets from generation 3000 up to 4000 and also the newest 5000 series of desktop processors so you should definitely take care if this main board supports your amd cpu in my case it does nothing really special to this mainboard let's talk about storage and when we talk about storage it can be highly depending on your personal needs so how much data you need to store on your server and so on but what i can definitely tell you is when you install an operating system on a server or on any pc you should get an ssd over a traditional magnetic hard drive because this is just so much faster and it really isn't that much more expensive right so definitely the upgrade to an ssd better choose an nvme drive something like this here i picked up the kingston a 2000 nvme pcie so this is a really great nvme drive it is not really too expensive but it has some great values here so it has high speeds and this is really great so what i can definitely recommend you once you install something like proxmox or any virtualization technology on your server you should always put all the virtual hard drives on an ssd because what i can tell you from my experience is when you run many concurrent virtual machines and you store those virtual hard disks on a magnetic hard drive those virtual machines will run extremely slow so usually the cpu and memory is not the bottleneck on virtual machines it is in fact the hard drive so always put the virtual hard disk of all your virtual machines on an ssd drive it will make run your virtual machine so much faster than using a traditional hdd but now when we talk about data in large storage pools no you probably can go with an ssd but there it can get really expensive especially when you need large disk sizes so for a storage pool i always would go with traditional magnetic hard drives if the speed is not really so critical to you so in my case i wanted to build a storage pool with zfs i've talked about this in previous tutorials as well because zfs is a software rate that allows you to add some redundancy to your hard drive so for example you can spin up like three or four hard drives and add one hard drive as per t so you can't use the space of one hard drive but in case one of your hard drives fails you always have your data sort on all the other hard drives you don't lose any data when one drive is damaged so building something with zfs or also better fs on linux is a really great idea and you can definitely do that with traditional magnetic hard drives because zfs also can add some caching and put this on an ssd where you can actually speed up your storage pool as well so we have a lot of options there but one thing that is really important when we talk about software rates and zfs storage pools is which memory should you get so because you will find a lot of articles or people on the internet that will tell you that you should never run a zfs storage pool without ecc memory so for people who don't know what ecc memory is let me explain this quickly to you so ecc stands for error correction code and this is a specific function in some memory modules that can detect and repair data corruption that happens or occurs inside the memory so this is a common technique on any professional workstation or server equipment you commonly will see that on any professional server hardware yeah always everything runs with ecc memory there but it is not really common on any desktop or laptop pcs because you usually don't need that so the problem is when you want to build your home lab server with desktop technologies you barely find ecc support there and this is because usual desktop pcs that use file systems like ntfs or x4 when you want to run linux they don't really require ecc memory for their file system integrity so what can happen is when there is a data corruption happening on your file system and you're running ntfs or x4 this usually isn't a big deal on any desktop pcs because when there is one or two bits damaged you probably are not able to access one or two files but the entire file system is still accessible to you and sometimes linux and windows are even able to repair and restore some of these data corruptions that happens on the file system and you can always repair that somehow so the problem is really only with software rates like zfs or better fs and this is because those software rates usually operate a lot in the memory and not just on the hard disks so because there's a lot of caching and a lot of other operations happening in the memory before the data is written back to the hard drives so now if a data corruption occurs in the memory and this is immediately written back to the disk without any further repair or correction mechanism you can get your file system damaged so as i said on ntfs and x4 this is not a big deal you can probably repair it or also access all other files now this is very different on zfs also better fs because if there is damaged file system you cannot access the entire file system anymore so all your files are probably damaged or lost or corrupted and there are literally no really good tools to repair this and yeah this now sounds pretty worrying to you in fact it sounded to me as well but you need to consider when running a zfs storage pool you need to ask yourself is the data that you store on this storage pool really so important and do you have a functional backup mechanism that is probably stored somewhere else so if this is the case you probably can just go without ecc memory because it is very unlikely that something is damaged but if it does well you probably can always go back and restore the fights from a backup so in this case it probably isn't a really big deal but as always in technology things can go wrong things can be damaged and if there is a data corruption happening in your memory that is written back to the disk and it completely wipes out your entire storage pool and you don't have a functional backup or you want to build a reliable storage pool then this probably should worry you in fact it worried me as well so therefore i just went and searched for a solution to run ecc memory on desktop hardware which is really uncommon but luckily there is an option yeah and thanks to the guys on my discord server who pointed me in the right direction because there are three different types of memory here the first one is the unbuffered non-ecc memory this is the usual consumer memory you will find on all desktop pcs on all laptops then we have the buffered ecc memory you usually find in traditional server equipments rack servers workstations and so on but we also have the unbuffered ecc memory which is an ecc memory that is supported on some cpus and some main board models so now we need to step back to our original decision between amd and internet cpus because ecc mode or unbuffered ecc memory is usually not supported on most intel cpus that are consumer-like so for example the intel i5 series usually doesn't support ecc in fact just a few cpus of intel that work on desktop hardware like some of the xeon models supports ecc mode so on amd this is completely different so almost every amd ryzen supports ecc mode and also most of the main boards you will find there also have a supported option for that you need to take care and look carefully at the specifications because sometimes it's not really easy to identify whether your main board is supporting ecc mode or not and this is actually the reason why i've chosen to go with the md ryzen cpu and this particular mainboard here because it supports ecc mode if you go to the specification you can see that when you go to the memory you will see all these memory types are supported and also ecc and non-ecc unbuffered memory is supported which is the evidence of this should run but it is not really easy to find ecc memory that is supported on consumer hardware and it really took me quite a long time to find something that comes with high clock speeds but is also supported on consumer hardware for a fair price so therefore kingston is always a great resource to find memory modules that are good and supported on various types of hardware and i can strongly recommend this model to you so the kth pl 432e so this particular model comes in four different ways so the first one is 8 gigabytes 16 gigabytes and also the 32 gigabyte you will probably find that on amazon or on some vendors i will later show you where to find all the different parts of my home server build so don't worry about that and how much memory you need is completely depending on your virtual machines if you just need that for storage pool you can probably go with five gigabyte of memory linux will run fine with that but as long as you want to deploy many virtual machines you probably want to upgrade to something like 32 gigabytes like i did or maybe even more so that's really depending on how many virtual machines you're running and how much memory you will need on all these virtual machines and hopefully you will find a case where there is enough space for all the parts you want to put into your home lab server and i've decided to go with something new a vendor that i've never chosen before but the cases from the noxia especially the deep silent series sounded really promising to me because they have enough space for all the hard drives to build a really large zfs storage pool with traditional magnetic hard drives so when you go to the deep silent series you can see this is a very simple and a very clean design i really like it and you can also find this case in many different sizes which is pretty great so depending on which main board you got if you got an itx or maybe a full size atx mainboard you definitely can find a case where your mainboard fits in and where there's enough space for all your hard drives you want to put into this server and it also is not too expensive so that's really great and i really like the cage to mount all the hard drives you barely find that on modern pc cases and therefore i just went with that as a power supply i usually just choose something from be quiet because this is a german manufacturer and yeah i just like german products they are really great of course and i think i just went with the system power 8 series which probably is the previous series of this one here and this is nothing really special but it definitely has enough power and it also supports the gold standard so this should be a very efficient and a very good quality power supply here and if you're now wondering well where can i get all the parts where you can get the links and if you want to buy the same parts like i did or you want to get some other recommendations for other builds or future updates well i want to show you my new kit page so on kid.co the digital life you can find all my different builds i will regularly update when i want to share some hardware recommendations with you if i build something new for example if you're wondering which camera microphone and everything else i'm using in my youtube studio then you can just click on that and you will find a link to all the different equipment parts and everything and of course also this home lab server build i've just did so when you click on that you will find all the different parts like the noxia deep silence case the main board the ryzen processor the kingston ddr4 memory module the nvme drive and everything i've built with and of course you will also find links to amazon and maybe some other vendors where you can just get the parts and of course if you're using the amazon links you're also supporting my channel so i hope this is a comfortable way for you to find all the different parts and links and where i can also share any future recommendations so you can just go to my personal page there just follow me there and you will get all the updates when i release a new home live server build or any other recommendations and yeah then i ordered all the parts they arrived pretty quickly and i immediately started building this together with my son so that was really cool i really enjoyed building this stuff and i also want to show you something about proxmox and how i installed that and what you can do with that so yeah let's take a look how i installed the operating system so when you want to install proxmox on your home lab server it's really not that difficult you just go to the official homepage proxmox.com go to virtualization and then you will find the proxmox virtual environment also sometimes called proxmox ve and this is an operating system that is based on the debian linux distribution and add some management software on top of that and it's also based on linux kvm hypervisor and linux containers with lxc so with that software you have an integrated web interface where you can manage all your virtual machines you can also manage networks containers i available clusters as well so this is really really cool so to install that you just click on downloads and download the proxvox virtual environment download the iso image and use a tool like rufus to build a usb stick so one thing that you should consider is because i ran into this error you sometimes see when you want to insert proxmox you need to go to the rufus tool and then select the dd option to write the iso file to the usb drive and then you are able to install proxmox so it was just a small issue that could be easily fixed so there was really no problem with doing this and once you've installed that you can manage your virtual server over this web interface here where you can also add other servers you can build some clusters with that as well so this is really nice and you can manage your linux machine with that so you can open a remote shell which is pretty cool you can also see the network devices add other virtual network switches for your virtual machines you can manage dns settings so settings time settings you also have a firewall which is also pretty nice um of course you can also manage your storage pools in lvm or also zfs storage pools which we have talked about in the hardware section so if you want to create a storage pool directly on proxmox you can definitely do that so just click on zfs and then you can select your magnetic hard drives for example to build an entire storage pool with raid z for example let's pick raid z1 which should be equal to a raid 5 so this is also pretty great and you could also add compression to that and this will actually gain you some performance upgrades to traditional file systems and i also managed to add some virtual machines so for example i have a small ubuntu server that is currently running where i usually deploy some of my docker containers and porting on all the other stuff that i usually teach you in all other videos on this channel here but i also think of creating a trueness machine a virtualized trueness and pass through all the hard drives to that trueness virtual machine so i can manage a cfs storage pool and all network drives and something like a nest solution virtually on my home lab server as well so this is really nice i will start working on this project in the coming weeks and yeah i hope this will work so yeah this is the current state of my homeland server project as you can see i've not done so much with that but it's just a starting point i just wanted to talk about this server about the different hardware requirements in the operating system and so on but now it's up to you so what do you want to see here do you want a dedicated tutorial on proxmox do you want to see something with virtualized trueness and zfs storage pools just let me know in the comments so i hope you enjoyed this video and you could learn something and you now feel a little bit more comfortable with working on your own home lab server project and you're not afraid of building your own do-it-yourself home lab server and you know what you should consider when doing this so if you enjoyed it and this was helpful to you guys then please don't forget to hit the like button and of course subscribe if you want to watch more tutorials and content for it professionals and as always take care of yourself and i hope i see you soon bye bye

Channel: The Digital Life

Views: 32,256

Keywords: home server pc build, home server pc build 2020, home server pc build 2021, home server, pc build, home server 2020, home server build, home server build 2020, home server setup, cheap home server, how to build a home server, home media server, home network, cheap server, file server, how to build a pc, media server, vmware esxi

Id: nwlircveTHU

Length: 23min 26sec (1406 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021