In this repo I will layout my storage and backup solutions for all of the services and platforms running on my homelab. Currently, I manage everything with Proxmox and Proxmox Backup Server. While soultions like Unraid and TrueNAS are awesome, I have found over the years the Proxmox is actually an amazing solution for managing storage, network shares, and backups.
This readme is a compainion to my official walkthrough guide!
- Apps - List of all the apps and services.
- Home Assistant - Smart home services and automation.
- Media Server - Plex, Jellyfin, *arr stack, and more.
- Server Monitoring - Graphs and Visualizations for Unriad, Proxmox, and more.
- Surveillance System - Frigate NVR Solution with Coral TPU.
- Storage - Current Storage and Backup Solution.
- Proxy Managment - NGINX Proxy Manager, DDNS with Cloudflare, Local Domains, and more.
My current setup involves a single server with x3 NVME drives and a bunch of harddrives in a ZFS configuration. These are combined into seperate ZFS pools for the HDDs (vault) and the SSDs (flash). Vault is used as a large data storage pool and Flash is used for containers and virtual machines disks. No mattery your configuratiuon you can follow this guide. However, I would recommend at least one NVME SSD for your boot drive, and at least 512gb if you don't have any other NVME SSDs and at least x2 HHDs for file storage.
(not currently working)
- Navigate to Node > Repositories Disable the enterprise repositories.
- Now click Add and enable the no subscription repository. Finally, go Updates > Refresh.
- Upgrade your system by clicking Upgrade above the repository setting page.
My boot drive is small and I run all my containers and virtual machine disks on a seperate storage pool. So the lvm paritiion is not nessesary for me and goes unused. If you're running everything off the same boot drive for fast storage skips this. Also you should check out this video to learn more about LVM before doing anything.
- Delete local-lvm manually from web interface under Datacenter > Storage.
- Run the following commands within Node > Shell.
lvremove /dev/pve/data
lvresize -l +100%FREE /dev/pve/root
resize2fs /dev/mapper/pve-root
- Check to ensure your local storage partition is using all avalible space. Reassign storage for containers and VM if needed.
Enable IOMMU on in grub configuration within Node > Shell.
nano /etc/default/grub
You will see the line with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet", all you need to do is add intel_iommu=on or amd_iommu=on` depending on your system.
# Should look like this
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet intel_iommu=on"
Next run the following commands and reboot your system.
update-grub
Now check to make sure everything is enabled.
dmesg | grep -e DMAR -e IOMMU
dmesg | grep 'remapping'
Learn about enabling PCI Passthrough here
First, we are going to setup two ZFS Pools. A tank pool which is used for larger stored data sets such as media, images and archives. We also will make a flash pool which is used for virtual machine and container root file systems. This is what I name them for my setup. You can name these however you'd like.
First, checkout you disks and make sure that they're all there. Find this under Node > Disks. Make sure you whipe all the disks you plan on using and do note this will whipe any data on the disks, so make sure there is no important data on them and back up if needed.
Now, on the Proxmox sidebar for your datacenter, go to Disks > ZFS > Create: ZFS. This will pop up the screen to create a ZFS pool.
From this screen, it should show all of your drives, so select the ones you want in your pool, and select your RAID level (in my case RAIDZ for my vault pool and mirror for my flash pool) and compression, (in my case I keep it at on). Make sure you check the box that says Add to Storage. This will make the pools immiatily avalible and will prevent using .raw files as obsosed to my previous setup when I added directorties.
Now time to put these new storage pools in use. For this, we are going to create our first LXC. In this example the LXC is going to be in charge of managing our media server. First we need a operating system image. Click on your local storage in the sidebar and click on CT Templates then the Templates button. From there search for Ubuntu and download the ubuntu-22.04-standard template.
Now in the top right click on Create CT. The "Create: LXC Container" prompt should show up. On the general tab I set my CT ID to 100 (later I will match this to a local IP for organization) and I set the hostname to "servarr", you can name it anything like media, jellyfin, or whatever. Set your password, keep the container and unpriviledged and click Next. Select your downloaded Ubuntu template and click next. Under disk you can select your storage location. If you created the flash pool like we did eariler select it, otherwise local is fine. For storage I picked 64gb as my media server is quite large. Click next as we will add the data and docker directory later. Give it as many CPU cores and ram as you need, for my setup I gave it 6 cores and 8gb of memory.
Under network we will leave most everything, but I like to give it a static IP here. If you want to manage this with your router select DHCP. Under IPv4 I set the IPv4/CIDR to 10.0.0.100/24' and the gateway to 10.0.0.1` your local IP may be different. Keep DNS as is and confirm the installation.
Now that our container is created I want to add some storage and mount the data and docker directories on my system. Click on your newly created LXC and then click on Resources. From there click the Add button and select mount point. The first one I'll add is going to be for the bulk file storage or I will change the option under storage to tank. For path I will set this to /data and uncheck backup. We will set up backups later. I want to dedicate a ton of room to this so I 26078 GiB (28 TB). Set this to what works best your how much media you'd like to store there. I keep everything else as is and click create. For the docker mount I repeated all these steps, but set the storage to flash, mount point to /docker, and gave it about 128gb of space.
In our new LXC we first need to run some general updates and user creation.
- Update your system ''' sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y '''
- Create your user ''' adduser brandon adduser brandon sudo '''
Great video resource by KeepItTechie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gW4rWhurUs source
- Set permissions of mount points created eariler.
sudo chown -R brandon:brandon /data
sudo chown -R brandon:brandon /docker
- Install Samba
sudo apt install samba
- Create a backup of the default configuration
cd /etc/samba
sudo mv smb.conf smb.conf.old
- Edit the samba config
sudo nano smb.conf
This is my configuration
[global]
server string = Servarr
workgroup = WORKGROUP
security = user
map to guest = Bad User
name resolve order = bcast host
hosts allow = 10.0.0.0/24
hosts deny = 0.0.0.0/0
[data]
path = /data
force user = brandon
force group = brandon
create mask = 0774
force create mode = 0774
directory mask = 0775
force directory mode = 0775
browseable = yes
writable = yes
read only = no
guest ok = no
[docker]
path = /docker
force user = brandon
force group = brandon
create mask = 0774
force create mode = 0774
directory mask = 0775
force directory mode = 0775
browseable = yes
writable = yes
read only = no
guest ok = no
- Add your samba user
sudo smbpasswd -a [username]
- Set services to auto start on reboot
sudo systemctl enable smbd
sudo systemctl enable nmbd
sudo systemctl restart smbd
sudo systemctl restart nmbd
- Allow samba on firewall if you run into any issues.
sudo ufw allow Samba
sudo ufw status
- Install wsdd for Windows discorvery
sudo apt install wsdd
Work in Progress