Most of us have something on our task list we’re avoiding, or a project we’ve been putting off.

I had been putting off, for far too long I guess, upgrading my old and slow NAS that I bought without doing enough research. It’s that silver box to the right of the laptops in the picture. And also I was a bit cheap I guess, buying too small hard drives which I had to upgrade some time later…

But enough about the old stuff, what’s interesting is the new and fun stuff. For a long time I was thinking it had to be either a Qnap or a Synology. But I also started considering other alternatives, like building something of my own…

• Buying a NAS chassis, and new disks covering my long term needs. Likely a Qnap or Synology discstation
• Build something from an old PC, and reuse the old drives.
• Build a completely new NAS, from scratch, and possibly reuse the old drives.

Somewhere along the line I found out about TrueNAS, a free solution that you could install on almost any hardware, or even buy preinstalled like any other NAS. About the same time I also stumbled on another interesting topic that I felt was an enticing alternative and might serve as a neat solution increasing the value of the NAS/Server… What I’m talking about is virtualization, containerization, docker, kubernetes… I already had several applications, servers and tools running on a bunch of different hardware, ranging from dedicated smart home appliance to Raspberry Pi’s and laptops. What if I could move some or all of these to one single platform…

After a bit of research and planning I ended up choosing Proxmox as the virtualization “platform” and selected an AMD processor with plenty of cores to do the grunt work. A decent amount of memory to be shared among whatever number of virtual machines I could end up running.

At same time as the decision was made to build the server, I also decided to upgrade or update the “infrastructure”, including cabling and housing. This meant that it would make sense to build the server in a rack mounted chassi.