Source
r/homelab•
MilkshakeG

To Centralize or to Decentralize?

Discussion

Hey all -

Running into a conundrum and wanted to hear the hive mind’s thoughts.

Here’s my current setup:

Supermicro server running PFsense (bare metal) Gaming PC (mine)

GF’s gaming PC (running “headless” and she only uses steam link to our apple TVs)

Dell R320 - Truenas Scale bare metal

Dell optiplex micro - windows bare metal

Dell optiplex micro 2 - proxmox with the following services:

Home assistant Unifi Pihole Arr suite

As I take a step back and look, I’m feeling that I should just build/source a beefier server and run most things on that server through proxmox.

All of the services, easy

Girlfriend’s gaming PC, slightly harder but doable (she does not play AAA titles/multiplayer games and it’s mostly for emulators anyways), doable.

Truenas, probably doable but might be tricky.

Is this a bad idea?

Posted Jul 6, 2023, 12:51 AM UTC

32
varano14•

I’ve had this internal discussion more then once, I’m not sure I have an answer but here are my thoughts.

I run pretty much the same as what you do, home assistant and Plex plus the related apps.

I was very much for putting it all on the same server until something went wrong in HA and completely nuked my cache drive which deleted all the configuration info for all VMs and dockers. So I rbi k the more you consolidate the more important backups are.

In my setup Plex is extremely stable and runs its self. I also use it daily so even being down for a few hours while not life threading is a pretty big inconvenience.

I currently have:

  1. a dedicated windows box running blue iris for security cameras. I always felt this was to mission critical for a vm and this incident confirmed it.

  2. The Plex + home assistant server which also handles the AI processing for blue iris.

  3. Two gaming rigs. These are very not mission critical and I have considered putting them into the server but the difficulties that come with that seem to out weigh the rewards.

The decided factor for much of this is that my electricity is currently .09 per kw. If it was way higher I’d likely feel different p

2
DBFriendly•

As another commenter mentioned, backups can be real chore instead of dealing with them more "indiviually".

If you want the "best of both worlds", putting similar services into beefER servers might work that way you can keep configurations, backup jobs/routines/etc, maintenance, hardware needs, reliability needs, security needs, etc more "alike" in a given machine.

2