Being a noob and all I was wondering whats the real benefit of having a monolithic lets say proxmox instance with router, DNS, VPN but also home asssistant and NAS functionalitiy all in one server? I always thought dedicated devices are simpler to maintain or replace and some services are also more critical than others I guess?
I’d say mostly energy savings and CPU usage efficiency
I’m no expert; only been dipping my toes in the selfhosted water for a few years.
But my thought process would be all the main stuff on your main server and the redundant instances on a little backup
I have a Raspberry Pi 4B as my load bearing Mac mini.
Use containers. Start with one device. Check your utilization after you’re sure you’ve hit min and max for each of your services, then figure out if your single device can handle all your services gunning at once. If not, take your biggest service and migrate it to its own device.
Eventually, you might find yourself googling “Kubernetes vs Docker Swarm.” When you do that, take a deep breath and decide if upgrading one device is easier than trying to horizontally scaling many.
I will point out that Kubernetes is a tool for container orchestration and automation, not necessarily a container cluster. I have found many benefits from using Kubernetes on a single node.
I have a coworker who uses Docker Swarm at home, but it seems kinda non-standard to me. Probably not a big deal for typical homelab scale, but its nice to lab out Kubernetes if you’re also using it at work.
Pretty much the tradeoff that you said. Harder to maintain an all in one box since things conflict with each other. That said, it’s also harder to maintain 10 devices instead of 2. Usually, you want to segregate your services based on maintenance schedule. Something that you reboot once a year like your router probably shouldn’t be on the same device as something that you might reboot every day, like home assistant, if you value your sanity.
Also, virtualization is pretty much dead-end now and will just make your life harder.
In terms of the easiest software available for self hosting, I would use a dedicated router and a dedicated nas, as those are fairly standalone and can be purchased as appliances. Then I would use a single machine with Debian or NixOS, and use it as a Kubernetes or Docker host. (Kubernetes is super easy with k3s and easier to maintain than Docker, but there’s a higher barrier to entry as you’d have to write your services with Pod files instead of docker-compose files)
I wouldn’t recommend something that tries to do everything, like Unraid, TrueNAS, or Proxmox, as they honestly obfuscate things and make things harder to maintain.
If you’re interested in high availability and clustering, you could even look into ceph/rook, which is what I’m using for my NAS, but it’s like 20x the effort of just having a standard NFS appliance.
Yep, I think there’s sound arguments for separating out your storage (NAS) and network (router/DNS/PiHole) infrastructure. After that, whatever suits your purpose. I virtualise all my serious services on one machine under Proxmox (mostly for ease of snapshots) then have another machine for things I’m fiddling with, usually again under Proxmox so they are easy to move to production when I’m happy with them.
Makes sense. I would probably recommend more infrastructure-as-code workflows over snapshots, like ArgoCD or docker-compose, as git commits are simpler than VM snapshots. But both ways work.
Kubernetes is super easy with k3s and easier to maintain than Docker
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say this… Kubernetes is a massive pain in the ass to learn, maintain and troubleshoot. If you find it easy that’s great, but it’s not for everyone.
I mean that with k3s you can get a kubernetes cluster running with 0 effort on a single machine. It is easier to maintain, because it handles restarting containers, updating containers, managing ports, provisioning storage, creating databases, etc for you. I’ve found the logs and events system to be super useful for troubleshooting compared to Dockerd, but maybe it can be tricky if it does something you don’t expect it to.
Obviously you need to learn how to use that automation to take advantage of it, and stuff like networking and persistent volumes can be confusing if you don’t have a good guide on it. The fact that there are different drivers for networking, storage, database management, etc can also take a bit of time. That said, networking and storage can be confusing on Docker too if you don’t have a good guide, and Docker-compose also has a learning curve, so I honestly don’t think Kubernetes is that much more effort. The main thing is that most guides are written for Docker, but the Kubernetes documentation is really good too.
If you just want to just run containers for jellyfin and home-assistant, Docker compose will be good enough. But if you want databases, reverse proxy, certificates, dns, self-healing, etc, for running bigger stuff like nextcloud and lemmy, then I would spend the extra 50% effort and do it on Kubernetes, it’ll save you time and headaches in the long run.
I do all that with docker… I fail to see what Kubernetes adds to that on a single machine.
Kubernetes does it a lot better. No more messing with caddy config files, or docker sockets, you get the real deal, production stuff.
A new high-availability postgres cluster with automatic backups is just a Cluster, a firewall rule is just a NetworkPolicy, a new subdomain is just an HTTPRoute, a new proxy container is just a Gateway, a new auto-renewed Let’s Encrypt certificate is just a Certificate, and DNS is set up automatically with the domain name from the HTTPRoute without me touching anything. Everything is high-availability and self-healing, I’ve never had anything go down or crash.
The other thing is ArgoCD, which automatically syncs your cluster with git. If I edit any of my config files in git, it is instantly updated on the cluster itself.
Here is my configuration for my 200+ containers, even my Lemmy instance is running here: https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b/src/branch/main/argo/custom_applications
Docker and the Docker ecosystem copies a lot of features from Kubernetes, because they’re essentially the same thing, but Kubernetes does it in a production-ready, maintainable way. Kubernetes is an automation tool that lets 1 engineer do the work of 10.
Right, right, you just have to reinvent a dozen wheels, use only software that Kubernetes knows how to work with, and learn a bunch of new names for everything.
I’m running an Unraid server. You can pop in and manage everything with the CLI like you would on traditional server OSes and it’ll show your containers, images, orphans etc. in the GUI and throws alerts out of the box for utilization thresholds and power events. It’s quite nice at a glance and gets the fuck out of the way the moment it’s time to be a sysadmin.
Unraid brings some good things to the table, I wouldn’t discount it completely.
I’m well aware.
I was #8 on this list: https://web.archive.org/web/20240221094039/unraid.net/about
The way that Unraid manages Docker containers is really dumb, and it gets in your way SO MUCH. Orphans are not a normal Docker idea, it is something invented by Unraid. It actively makes managing containers harder, as there is no documented way to restore orphans if I recall correctly. Creating new containers is confusing and uses non-standard terminology, when docker-compose files have been standard for half a decade now. Unraid is a really bad container orchestrator with bad abstractions and no ability to do Infrastructure as Code. The only good thing is the GUI for monitoring containers.
I guess if you’re doing everything with the CLI and just using the GUI for monitoring it makes sense, but CLI is not a supported workflow with Unraid. Also what are you paying $3/month for if you’re just going to use the CLI? I wouldn’t recommend the overhead, setup, and upgrade headaches over just doing the CLI with Debian. There are much nicer free dashboards available for Kubernetes.
For what it’s worth, this is my homelab: https://codeberg.org/jlh/h5b
I run over 300 containers in a 4 node cluster, with a separate router and iot server. Every single piece is implemented in code, because that’s easier to maintain and document. I used Proxmox for VMs/LXC for a while, and I used FreeNAS for ZFS+NFS for a while, but now I use purely NixOS and Kubernetes. I have never seen Unraid as a valuable thing that I would like to add to my homelab in the past 8 years.
Interesting, self hosting crossplane. What do you use it for?
Orphans are just dangling objects, are they not?
I’m only using the Unraid Docker GUI to send me utilization alerts and notify me when my images are egregiously out of date. I saw someone trying to author a compose file using the GUI once and I closed the window before the headache started.
I’m not paying $3/mo. Where’d you get that idea? I think I paid $20 for a license like 6 years ago.
I picked Unraid because I had a bunch of disparate HDDs sitting around and their filesystem intrigued me. (0 data loss after 3 drive failures so far.)
Fair enough. I think it’s bad to invent new words for “stopped container”, though.
Yeah, the container creation GUI is a mess. The $3/month thing is a new thing they started for new customers this year. https://unraid.net/pricing
Not a big deal for grandfathered users, but I think its important to consider as a new customer, as you won’t even get security updates without paying the subscription fee. Even for vulnerabilities like the CVE-2024-21626 Leaky Vessels vulnerability.
The raid is nice, but it can be kinda clunky adding/removing drives sometimes and I’ve managed to accidentally destroy an array when I was playing with it. I think you can get identical features using LVM, but obviously it’s nice how Unraid does it all for you in a GUI.
I think it’s bad to invent new words for “stopped container”
You’re not wrong!
The cheapest option Is the monthly one for no security updates, there are still regular pro and higher plans which are one and done, no grandfathering
Having as much on one machine as possible has efficiency and maintenance benefits since you have less machines to configure. The drawback is that multiple services can add up peak demands and run the machine oom which you can either solve by leaving extra headroom or make them redundant imo.
Someone with more experience than me might have other ideas to add.
Its the difference between running home things and having the money to run datacenter reliability.
Having everything on just a few VM hosts is so much easier, cheaper, and efficient. It’s eventually a bigger investment though. The days of bare-metal are long gone!
“Easier” and “simpler” are in the eye of the beholder.
A different way to approach it is to limit the failure domains. If this breaks how sad are you?
I would separate storage from the rest. Networking stuff together may be fine. Home assistant depends on how dependent on it your household is.
This is the way.
There’s nothing worse than finding your DNS/DHCP has gone down and it’s a VM / container running inside a server that can’t start because it doesn’t have an IP address and you can’t resolve names to get the thing started.
Break things down into chunks that make sense - to you.
I have dedicated (low power) hardware for the interweb firewall / DHCP / core network stuff.
I have a NAS for storage with all the backups / reinstall images on (so I can rebuild the firewall if there’s no internet, for example)
Then I have everything else in a single server.
Sources: a house fire, water leak & many hardware failures & borked upgrades over many decades.
This is what I do:
- Stuff that’s critical runs on VPSes running Debian stable. Things like my websites, email, authoritative DNS, etc. The VPS providers I use have nicer hardware than me (modern AMD EPYC servers, enterprise NVMe drives in RAID10 with warm spares, 40Gbps networking, etc)
- Other stuff is on a home server running Unraid. It has a Core i5-13500 with a W680 motherboard, 2 x 2TB NVMe drives in ZFS mirror, 2 x 20TB Seagate Exos drives in ZFS mirror for data storage, and 1 x 14TB WD Purple Pro for security camera recordings.
- I have a Raspberry Pi with a few things on it, like a second copy of my recursive DNS server, AdGuard Home (so the internet doesn’t break if I need to shut down “the main server”).
I was thinking of running several servers at home, but right now I’m just running one main one. I don’t have much space and it’s running fine for me for now. Power is expensive here. I’ve got solar power, but I get 1:1 credits for excess solar power, so I’d rather save it for other things.
Services that can utilize the full power of a single machine are quite rare. I have about 15 docker containers in total taking up about 800mb of ram on one of my servers. In reality having multiple can be more complex and harder to maintain, not to mention power efficiency and cost.
It could be a good idea to move more critical things to a different machine. It’s often said that you shouldn’t run your router and/or firewall on your main server, but I think there are also security reasons for that.
Or to move those to a low power consumption machine with cheaper hardwRe that are either more resource friendly, or very heavy but it’s fine if they can only finish their task over a longer time.
Also, think about how could things go wrong. Have a second DNS and DHCP server (it’s difficult to run a secondary DHCP besides the primary, maybe you don’t need that), and some way you can reach the internet if the router or the firewall gets borked. That “way” does not need to be accessible at all times, but you should be able to switch it on when needed.
Don’t forget to test that these are actually working after you have sweet them up.Whatever you decide on, don’t forget that you don’t have to do everything at once. Don’t let it overload you. Learning new tech takes time.
I started out with the monolith approach and really the benefit I saw is that it can be more compact, and possibly more power efficient while achieving the same thing.
I ultimately moved towards dedicated hardware for critical things like networking, DNS, and Jellyfin because those are the type of services that people will notice going down or rebooting. And a low powered swarm cluster for everything else. It’s much easier to tinker with the lab when your playground has devices that other people aren’t dependent on.
There’s no right answer though I think what’s important is to learn about what fits your needs as you go deeper into the hobby or the professional world if that’s your goal.
