So I’m going to be getting a new housemate soon, and they will most likely take the room that’s housing my dell r420 and rack. It’s currently running proxmox and hosting a jellyfin instance that I and a few friends/family members are using.
I’d like to move the server to another area, but cooling and noise requirements are making this an issue. I was thinking about clustering a bunch or raspberry pi’s that I have sitting around to try and come up with something like a replacement, but I can’t get my head around moving my storage off local disk to a san that won’t have a fibrechannel connection to my compute. Should I be looking at other SBC types, or should I just invest in renovating to build a new suitable spot for my hardware? What would you do?
EDIT: I’m hosting more than jellyfin, but this is the app I’m worried about - everything else can make do with a slower storage-compute connection.
Consider a NUC or P51, more performant than RPI and super efficient!
I use three nucs and 10gig thunderbolt to cat6. 10gig switch to a qnap using iscsi. It’s super fast. Alternatively you could use vsan if you use VMware as ylir hypervisor. Which is also fast.
If you want to be super quiet… an array of Macbook Airs!
Have an MSI Cubi - very similar to a NUC - cannot recommend enough. Very low power consumption, more powerful than raspberry pi and runs X86/AMD64
Depends on Load. Realistically, one of the used “Mini PC’s” from Lenovo or HP with an i5 and integrated graphics should be decent for a couple of concurrent streams. They are pretty cheap on ebay. You could even get 3 or 4 and cluster them in some form. But most SBCs won’t work too well since transcoding needs a decent GPU of some sort.
Realistically, one of the used “Mini PC’s” from Lenovo or HP with an i5 and integrated graphics
Second this. I downsized from a couple of heavyweight enterprise servers to a handful of USFF Dell Optiplexes for the bulk of my self-hosted applications. I also have a stack of upgraded thin clients that run my smaller apps wonderfully.
The power, heat, and noise reduction has been amazing.
Since you basically only run Jellyfin, I would just convert a desktop into a server.
Choose one with a power efficient CPU. And depending if you need a lot of transcoding an external GPU or even integrated GPU.
Mine is idling most of the time with only the bare minimum of fan speed. If it wasn’t for the spinning disks it would be completly inaudible.
To top it off it’s only 30W idle. If you split the utility bill with your housemate I’m sure they’ll appreciate that.
Sorry, should have been clearer here; the only application I’m worried about is jellyfin; I also run a fileshare, domain controller, a git instance, and like to have a lab environment to build and tear down servers. I’ll edit the original comment to clear that up.
