Being a noob and all I was wondering whats the real benefit of having a monolithic lets say proxmox instance with router, DNS, VPN but also home asssistant and NAS functionalitiy all in one server? I always thought dedicated devices are simpler to maintain or replace and some services are also more critical than others I guess?
Services that can utilize the full power of a single machine are quite rare. I have about 15 docker containers in total taking up about 800mb of ram on one of my servers. In reality having multiple can be more complex and harder to maintain, not to mention power efficiency and cost.
I’d say mostly energy savings and CPU usage efficiency
I’m no expert; only been dipping my toes in the selfhosted water for a few years.
But my thought process would be all the main stuff on your main server and the redundant instances on a little backup
Having as much on one machine as possible has efficiency and maintenance benefits since you have less machines to configure. The drawback is that multiple services can add up peak demands and run the machine oom which you can either solve by leaving extra headroom or make them redundant imo.
Someone with more experience than me might have other ideas to add.
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Its the difference between running home things and having the money to run datacenter reliability.
Having everything on just a few VM hosts is so much easier, cheaper, and efficient. It’s eventually a bigger investment though. The days of bare-metal are long gone!
Sorry, I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. You can surely that, but if the host goes down, everything goes down. Single point of failure.
I split my setup into storage vs processing. Can one physical box handle both? If the answer is yes then go for it. If all your running is low IO stuff and it’s sipping cpu then one general purpose whitebox is a great start.
It could be a good idea to move more critical things to a different machine. It’s often said that you shouldn’t run your router and/or firewall on your main server, but I think there are also security reasons for that.
Or to move those to a low power consumption machine with cheaper hardwRe that are either more resource friendly, or very heavy but it’s fine if they can only finish their task over a longer time.
Also, think about how could things go wrong. Have a second DNS and DHCP server (it’s difficult to run a secondary DHCP besides the primary, maybe you don’t need that), and some way you can reach the internet if the router or the firewall gets borked. That “way” does not need to be accessible at all times, but you should be able to switch it on when needed.
Don’t forget to test that these are actually working after you have sweet them up.Whatever you decide on, don’t forget that you don’t have to do everything at once. Don’t let it overload you. Learning new tech takes time.
