I know this has been asked before but some of the threads I found dated back a good few years. SFF/Mini PCs new and old seem to be recommended for various bare metal implementations of things such as a NAS.
I am at a bit of a stop here because I’m not sure what I should and shouldn’t virtualize. I’ll pop here what I have currently that I want to throw some money/time at to improve.
Replace Archer 2300C router with OPNSense
I need vlans so it seems like a good point to ditch the consumer hardware and start using purpose made software on a box of some kind. To replace this I need to purchase an AP.
I already have a 4 way switch up stairs that go to 2 offices and an AP upstairs that is purely for my Meta Quest VR setup. I would need a switch downstairs due to having a Hue hub, Hive hub, Steam Deck and some other crap my wife has bought over the years.
Replace a 6-7 year old Lenovo laptop that is my server/transcoder/media player
I hate this thing. It currently runs Ubuntu and has docker containers for the following:
- Home Assistant
- Pihole
- Jellyfin + supporting software (radarr, sonarr etc etc)
- Prob other things I never use/forgot about
What I think I want to do
Proxmox all the things. I believe this is possible? Or should I at a bare minimum out OPNSense on bare metal? Is it ill advised to virtualize a transcoding setup?
I want to minimize the number of devices I am running. 5 years ago I ran an old Dell Poweredge server but I kept dishing out compute to friends/friends of friends for Minecraft/Factorio/Valheim servers and Plex logins and it got to the point the power bill was starting to hurt because the thing was just pegged at 99% CPU practically all the time. All this ran in Proxmox just fine.
This question is going to give a lot of subjective answers I know. The amount of information out there is staggering and I want to start down the right path. The first hardware purchase is going to decided that path.
Thoughts?