• Looking for guidance so bear with me....
   
  I've seen lots of mention in the various reddit homelab(ish) forums about unRAID and ProxMox to name two packages.  As a unix/linux admin for over 25 years, I'm curious about what products might make sense for my home use cases.  Just to level-set folks, I do AWS as well as desktop vagrant/virtualbox for $job if that matters, and have dabbled in Dockerizing the various VMs now and then, all on Windows/Linux/Mac hosts just to mess with'em all both at home and work.  I have far too many Raspi to admit.
   
  My server(ish) hardware is very limited due to size/noise constraints, so I'm using a 4th gen Intel NUC with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD currently running Win10Pro, but can add in a laptop drive if needed to get more internal storage, and of course can go USB3 disks as needed.  My needs lean more toward virtualization than data storage:
  
  • 
     
    
  • I've previously run ESXi 5.5 on it as well with everything virtualized
    
  • and later switched to centos7 kvm/qemu to try that on the hardware as well
    
  • other than running a few Windows-only apps, as needed, I don't really 'want' to run Windows natively
    
  • but currently I run win10pro as the host os because it's what the NUC best supports natively, really for mobo fan control, as both ESXi and centos7 have had the fan run 100% occasionally to the point where I need to kill power from the box to reset it.  Must be a mobo thing.
    

 

Regarding software needs:

• big need is running a home security cam solution always on the box.  If linux/virtualized that would be zoneminder
  
• would need to run win10pro occasionally for a few windows-only apps, but would not need to be up all the time
  
• and any fiddling in linux that I'd do can be virtualized or dockerized on the NUC using any virtualization solution it'll run
  
• for automation, I'd use ansible given a choice, if that matters
  
• I 'would' like to do some kind of network dashboard vm or container monitoring the home network gear (Ubiquiti stuff) probably using SNMP
  

 

I don't have a lot of need for storage, well under 300 GB for music+movies, and have a small Debian ARM box that serves that up via minidlna for that as needed.

 

So where I'm a little confused is, is unRAID a storage solution that does virtualization and ProxMox is a virtualization solution that does storage, or am I understanding them wrong ?  I've built my own solutions for so long on Linux that I haven't followed these products basically at all, but given the fact that both communities seem to love the respective products, I guess I'm looking for a synopsis if which one might be better for my virtualization-centric needs.  Sometimes just running somebody's integrated solution is lower blood pressure.  I get to do enough hard stuff at $job.

 

Interested in suggestions.  Apologies if I picked the wrong forum.  Thanks !

 

 

 

Proxmox is a hypervisor, similar to ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM etc, and it allows you to create and manage VMs as well as containers. Its an enterprise grade solution.

 

unRAID is primarily meant to provide a safe, expandable NAS storage solution for home users, and as the 'un' suggests, it provides data safety in case of disk failure without the pitfalls and complexity of solutions like RAID (which don't allow expansion, keep data in non-native format, keep disks spinning etc etc).

 

As a home server, unRAID allowed adding scripts/plugins for various additional functionality. With v6, its feature set was expanded dramatically and it can now run VMs using the full power of KVM and has an easier interface to manage things like virtualization and Docker.

 

Since you are a pretty advanced user, esp since you said "My needs lean more toward virtualization than data storage" I believe any of these will serve you well. With unRAID you can get most of the features but it won't be as powerful/configurable as a full blown Hypervisor/Docker manager since one of the main goals is ease of use for the non-technical user. e.g. if you want to use things like Chef/Puppet/Ansible to automate your processes, use Docker compose, scripts etc, then this wouldn't be ideal as you are not the target audience. If however you want to have expandable storage as the main goal and also run other services via VM/containers without wanting to manage them yourself (e.g when I come home I want something simpler than my day job) then it works great.

 

TLDR - if your storage needs are minimal, esp if you don't want to expand/protect drives, and your main goal is virtualization, monitoring, dashboards etc, then this may not be the best fit.

 

Hope it helped.