Build Advice Suggestions for a power efficient Home Server build ?

[noideagamer]

I would like to build a power efficient small home server for visualizing a few services in my home (e.g. pfsense, pi hole, few docker containers). It would also be great if it had some storage (1-2tb) to serve as a NAS and enough grunt to virtualise a usable Ubuntu desktop. The desktop will be just for web surfing, email, Office applications.

Having watched a lot of YouTube channels many recommend the mini PC route with embedded processor and graphics such as these two 1 2. However, I have also been warned that these embedded chips will have really poor performance for my needs, so am looking for other suggestions. Here are my requirements and would welcome some advice:

- No gaming or video editing so dedicated graphics not required
- Needs to be very power efficient to run 24/7
- Doesn't need to be particularly small, although smaller would be better
- Happy to consider previous gen equipment or repurpose refurbished PCs like corporate mini PCs like the Lenovo Thinkcentre or even repurpose laptop
- dual or more NICs so I can pass through physical NICs to pfsense using proxmox

Specific answers ......

Approximate Purchase Date: this month
Budget Range: £500 (After Rebates, but Before Shipping)
System Usage from Most to Least Important: Virtualised services, docker, proxmox
Are you buying a monitor: No
Parts to Upgrade: : CPU, mobo, RAM, psu
Do you need to buy OS: No I'm going to run linux
Preferred Website(s) for Parts: none and willing to buys some used from ebay
Location: City, State/Region, Country - UK
Parts Preferences: no
Overclocking: No
SLI or Crossfire: no idea what this is
Your Monitor Resolution: 1920x1080

 

[NedSmelly]

I have run OpenMediaVault and Pihole on a single Raspberry Pi 4 board with an external 4TB USB hard drive. Draws less than 10 watts.

Adequate for file transfers at Gigabit, which matches the HD read/write bandwidth.

Probably won’t be sufficient to virtualise a desktop environment though (I used it on PiOS CLI only).

 

[kanewolf]

Look for an embedded motherboard with an Intel Jxxx CPU. Quad core, Intel.

 

[noideagamer]

I have run OpenMediaVault and Pihole on a single Raspberry Pi 4 board with an external 4TB USB hard drive. Draws less than 10 watts.

Adequate for file transfers at Gigabit, which matches the HD read/write bandwidth.

Probably won’t be sufficient to virtualise a desktop environment though (I used it on PiOS CLI only).

I did think about a Pi 5, but by the time I would add extra hats for M.2 drives and extra NIC for the money I thought one of the NAS or router boards may give me more performance for similiar cost?

 

[noideagamer]

Look for an embedded motherboard with an Intel Jxxx CPU. Quad core, Intel.

Something like this - this was my original train of through but was warned performance would be poor? I had been looking at the N100 CPU/board

 

[NedSmelly]

I did think about a Pi 5, but by the time I would add extra hats for M.2 drives and extra NIC for the money I thought one of the NAS or router boards may give me more performance for similiar cost?

Yeah it starts to get janky and less cost effective once hats and pcie adapters get involved. And cable management is challenging.

A fair bit of love is being shown to the Intel N100 mini pcs lately on social media as alternatives. Might be worth checking out - I think Explainingcomputers and Geerling looked at these recently.

 

[noideagamer]

Yeah it starts to get janky and less cost effective once hats and pcie adapters get involved. And cable management is challenging.

A fair bit of love is being shown to the Intel N100 mini pcs lately on social media as alternatives. Might be worth checking out - I think Explainingcomputers and Geerling looked at these recently.

I've watched their content and had the N100 on my list - seemed to fit the bill

 

[kanewolf]

Something like this - this was my original train of through but was warned performance would be poor? I had been looking at the N100 CPU/board

I would NOT recommend that your PfSrnse router share functionality with anything else. It is most likely to be attacked and compromised. You don't want your NAS storage on that device, IMO.

 

[USAFRet]

I would NOT recommend that your PfSrnse router share functionality with anything else. It is most likely to be attacked and compromised. You don't want your NAS storage on that device, IMO.

Exactly.

The pfSense should be an individual physical box.

 

[noideagamer]

I would NOT recommend that your PfSrnse router share functionality with anything else. It is most likely to be attacked and compromised. You don't want your NAS storage on that device, IMO.

If it was running as a VM in proxmox with a NIC passed through would not have enough isolation from the rest of the internal network?

 

[USAFRet]

If it was running as a VM in proxmox with a NIC passed through would not have enough isolation from the rest of the internal network?

Not for me.

 

[kanewolf]

If it was running as a VM in proxmox with a NIC passed through would not have enough isolation from the rest of the internal network?

Not in my opinion. Firewalls SHOULD ALWAYS be physically separate from everything else.

 

[noideagamer]

Thanks @kanewolf @USAFRet makes sense to be honest. I'd just watched a few videos suggesting pfsense be virtualised so assumed this would provide enough isolation. Might need to rethink my plans ....

 

[kanewolf]

Thanks @kanewolf @USAFRet makes sense to be honest. I'd just watched a few videos suggesting pfsense be virtualised so assumed this would provide enough isolation. Might need to rethink my plans ....

What benefit do you believe you will get from PfSense over a purpose build router ?
You could get a MikroTik HEX -- https://mikrotik.com/product/RB750Gr3 and have more router capabilities than you could ever use ...

 

[USAFRet]

Thanks @kanewolf @USAFRet makes sense to be honest. I'd just watched a few videos suggesting pfsense be virtualised so assumed this would provide enough isolation. Might need to rethink my plans ....

A guest system in a VM can often find out many things about the host. Or an exploit can even escape the VM, and mess with the host.

Running your router/firewall on the same hardware as other VM things...not a great idea.

 

[noideagamer]

What benefit do you believe you will get from PfSense over a purpose build router ?
You could get a MikroTik HEX -- https://mikrotik.com/product/RB750Gr3 and have more router capabilities than you could ever use ...

It was more I was trying to rationalize down to a single device as I thought virtualising the services would be ok. At the moment have my router, a pi hole running on a RPi, another pi to run my IP camera setup. After watching a few videos it seemed like I could comebine all of these as VMs using proxmox and/or docker

 

[kanewolf]

It was more I was trying to rationalize down to a single device as I thought virtualising the services would be ok. At the moment have my router, a pi hole running on a RPi, another pi to run my IP camera setup. After watching a few videos it seemed like I could comebine all of these as VMs using proxmox and/or docker

A commercial NAS can handle those duties. A QNAP NAS comes with licenses for 4 cameras.
Many NAS units support docker.

 

[USAFRet]

A QNAP NAS comes with licenses for 4 cameras.

Exactly what I'm using right now for my house cameras.

 

[noideagamer]

True - but I think they are probably out of my budget, hence why I was looking at a DIY solution. I will cgheck out used prices on QNAP

 

[Louie1961]

I might be too late to the party, but I run an HP Elitedesk 800 G9 as my main Proxmox node. It has a i5-12500T processor, 64 GB of memory and two m.2 NVME drives in a ZFS mirror. It idles around 12 watts. I run 5 VMs, 12 docker containers, and 2 LXC containers. My typical CPU usage is almost always less that 2% since my workloads are not that intensive (Wordpress, Nextcloud, Home Assistant, Cloudflare tunnels, Uptime Kuma, Heimdall, Groicy, Mealie, etc.). I have a separate NAS unit, but you could easily add a DAS array or external disks to one of these and spin up your favorite NAS operating system software.