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Homelab & Self-Hosting ·

My Homelab Setup: Why I Run Two Separate Servers

One server for storage and containers, another for virtual machines and game hosting. Here is how I ended up with two, and what each one does.

My homelab began with a simple problem. I wanted to host game servers and a few open-source apps without leaving my main PC running all day. It has grown a lot since, and it now runs on two separate physical servers plus a VPS.

Diagram of my homelab: internet, Cloudflare, a remote VPS running Pelican Panel, and an Unraid NAS and a Proxmox host behind a UniFi firewall

The short version

  • NAS1 runs Unraid. It handles storage, Docker applications and media.
  • Prox1 runs Proxmox. It handles virtual machines, including the one that runs game servers.
  • A VPS runs Pelican Panel behind a proxy, away from my home network.

NAS1: storage and containers

NAS1 runs Unraid 7.3.2 on an Intel Core i7-12700K with 64 GiB of DDR4. Its main job is storage for media, files and content creation work. It has five hard drives making up 64TB, four NVMe pools, and an NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER for transcoding and a little AI work. On top of that it runs a long list of Docker containers.

Prox1: virtual machines

Prox1 runs Proxmox VE 9.2.5 on an Intel Core i7-11700K with roughly 64 GiB of RAM. One virtual machine runs Pelican Wings, which hosts the game servers for my community. Another is a Windows machine for software that only runs on Windows, where I can trial things in a contained space.

Why two servers

The two machines do different jobs. Storage and containers want a box that is always on and easy to look after. Virtual machines and game servers want isolation and room to experiment. Keeping them apart means I can break one without affecting the other.

What I have learned

The hardest part is rarely the setup. It is working out why something fails when the error message tells you almost nothing. I add logging, rewrite scripts and try again, and that process teaches me more than a smooth install ever would.

What is next

I would like faster wired and Wi-Fi networking, and I am looking at 10Gb. I am also considering fibre links between network nodes, and a half-rack or portable rack table, since the servers currently live in a spare corner.

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