Hi All,

 

I recently built a mini "home server" using the N100DC-ITX with 16gb of RAM. 

 

I am utilizing 2 SSDs at the moment 250 gb each one parity and one disk. 

 

I have a LSI SAS HBA 9211-4i in IT Mode coming with the intention of more SSDs smaller and of the same size as the parity. 

 

My plan is nothing to do with serving media or home backups if I am honest. 

 

I am running a WordPress site, mariaDB and vault warden. I am using Cloudflare Tunnels at the moment (fantastic although I cant get nginx to work but that does not matter as you can run multiple public hostnames through it).

 

Is unraid the wrong answer here ? Am I safer just using the likes of Windows Server (I can get free licenses) or Linux. Or should I be running proxmox? What drove me to Unraid is the nice UI and the drive setup (can add more but clearly I don't really need this feature due to how little data I actually store.) I am just obsessed with not losing data. 

 

Some suggestions or direction would be great. The WordPress site will be ran 24/7. (not even sure docker is the correct use case here either). 

 

Thanks all ! 

Edited October 10, 20232 yr by turbocrow
Spelling

My first thoughts are if your main requirement is a virtualization platform, you would be better served by choosing an application which is focused on virtualization.  If you already have one you are knowledgeable, go with that.  If it is all fairly new to you, Proxmox isn't a bad choice, as there is tons of support and a large user base.

 

Unraid is a great home lab platform.  Its roots are in NAS and video server, and over the years has matured into so much more.  And it does have a great user community to offer assistance.  But a Swiss army knife isn't the best choice if you are predominantly only going to use one of its tools.

1 hour ago, ConnerVT said:

My first thoughts are if your main requirement is a virtualization platform, you would be better served by choosing an application which is focused on virtualization.  If you already have one you are knowledgeable, go with that.  If it is all fairly new to you, Proxmox isn't a bad choice, as there is tons of support and a large user base.

 

Unraid is a great home lab platform.  Its roots are in NAS and video server, and over the years has matured into so much more.  And it does have a great user community to offer assistance.  But a Swiss army knife isn't the best choice if you are predominantly only going to use one of its tools.

Thank you Conner the Swiss Army Knife analogy fits this perfectly. 

 

It has been fun and I can see its use cases but it is now a choice between Proxmox and ESXI (which does not support software raid so I assume I should rule that out). 

 

Any opinions ? 

 

I do have experience in ESXI and could get a license for it too but the raid issue might not be worth the hassle. 

I will defer to others whom have much more experience with running VM.  I'm still a novice when it comes to virtualization (but deep into this world of hardware and software for about 40 years).  Only about a year since I rebuilt my server with enough horsepower to support running VM and everything else I had running on it.

7 hours ago, turbocrow said:

I am running a WordPress site, mariaDB and vault warden. I am using Cloudflare Tunnels at the moment (fantastic although I cant get nginx to work but that does not matter as you can run multiple public hostnames through it).

...

The WordPress site will be ran 24/7.

What is the nature of the services you are planning to host. Personal blog, web-services for family and friends, small business site, webapp, home lab playground? What kind of uptime expectations? What kind of visibility do you expect? 

My recommendation in general is not to use unRAID for business (even small business, but others disagree). 

2 hours ago, primeval_god said:

What is the nature of the services you are planning to host. Personal blog, web-services for family and friends, small business site, webapp, home lab playground? What kind of uptime expectations? What kind of visibility do you expect? 

My recommendation in general is not to use unRAID for business (even small business, but others disagree). 

So a small business site. Although I will be running vaulwarden on the same hardware for myself only. I will be setting up a secondary system for fail over which is not as powerful so I will conduct an automatic DNS failover if it happens as I don't want it load balancing which would equal a not so great experience.  

 

24/7 is preferred (although honestly not super critical) so there will be a few single points of failure (network link and power) 

I will be utilising MariaDB Multi-Master Replication and unison for file replication. 

 

Of course if the business scales I will be moving to AWS to do this. (cloud Engineer by trade). I can't foresee that happening for some time yet if ever haha.

 

Thanks! 

Edited October 10, 20232 yr by turbocrow

7 hours ago, primeval_god said:

My recommendation in general is not to use unRAID for business (even small business, but others disagree). 

I agree, with one exception, if one of the company principals is the one in charge of the Unraid server because it was their idea, then I'm fine with it.