I’m still running a 6th-generation Intel CPU (i5-6600k) on my media server, with 64GB of RAM and a Quadro P1000 for the rare 1080p transcoding needs. Windows 10 is still my OS from when it was a gaming PC and I want to switch to Linux. I’m a casual user on my personal machine, as well as with OpenWRT on my network hardware.

Here are the few features I need:

  • MergerFS with a RAID option for drive redundancy. I use multiple 12TB drives right now and have my media types separated between each. I’d like to have one pool that I can be flexible with space between each share.
  • Docker for *arr/media downloaders/RSS feed reader/various FOSS tools and gizmos.
  • I’d like to start working with Home Assistant. Installing with WSL hasn’t worked for me, so switching to Linux seems like the best option for this.

Guides like Perfect Media Server say that Proxmox is better than a traditional distro like Debian/Ubuntu, but I’m concerned about performance on my 6600k. Will LXCs and/or a VM for Docker push my CPU to its limits? Or should I do standard Debian or even OpenMediaVault?

I’m comfortable learning Proxmox and its intricacies, especially if I can move my Windows 10 install into a VM as a failsafe while building a storage pool with new drives.

  • CouncilOfFriends@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    My server runs Debian VMs in Proxmox on an i7-2600 which has a lower benchmark than the 6600k. I also used the Perfect Media Server guide, and have 2 x 8T data drives pooled with MergerFS with 1 for snapraid parity, these are passed through to the main VM from Proxmox using ‘qm set’. One thing I would often forget after deleting/restoring this VM was to run qm set again after restore, ensuring it has the flag to not back up those drives or else backups will fail and I have to go uncheck the backup option on each drive to fix it.

    If I need to spin up another VM for tinkering it’s easy enough to mount the NFS share as a volume with docker compose. Proxmox rarely shows CPU usage go above 50% (average is 10%) and this handles the whole *arr stack plus usenet and torrents in a single VM and compose file. I don’t have GPU passthrough set up because the motherboard on this older rig didn’t support IOMMU, never had issues with Plex or Jellyfin transcoding for Chromecast. I might build a new rig with GPU passthrough support to buffer media faster and selfhost LLMs when I get around to it.