awesome-sysadmin VS OpenMediaVault

Jellyfin/Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Openbooks, PhotoPrism, Vaultwarden, Nextcloud, Uptime Kuma, Grafana/Zabbix, Navidrome, Nginx Proxy Manager, etc. Find more at awesome-sysadmin and awesome-selfhosted.

Learn, host, experience. We use home servers to build a lab, run various solutions to learn how the software works (prepare for a certification), to host/serve services for private/home use. https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin is another link to share.

You can implement all this using open source elements. Here's a nice list of things you could use to deploy these.

Virtualize your home server by using XCP-NG, Proxmox, VMware ESXi, or any Linux with KVM/QEMU. With the hypervisor, you can host many other services aside to home NAS, such as Plex, Pihole, HomeAssistant, etc. More services to run you can find at https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted and https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin

Not aware of running a Minecraft server (worth a try) but for sure you can host a website, file server (Nextcloud), VPN (Wireguard), and many other services from awesome-sysadmin and awesome-selfhosted you'd find useful serving for your home.

Awesome sysadmin

Jellyfin/Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Openbooks, PhotoPrism, Vaultwarden, Nextcloud, Uptime Kuma, Grafana/Zabbix, Navidrome, Nginx Proxy Manager, etc. Find more at awesome-sysadmin and awesome-selfhosted.

You might want to consider the previously mentioned MergerFS and SnapRAID, or MDADM and LVM for your setup. OpenMediaVault [https://www.openmediavault.org/ is a solid choice in this regard. Additionally, if you're planning to run something like Proxmox, you could look into deploying Starwind CVM on top of it. Pretty much like in this guide: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/ .

You would better to install OMV instead. It's a ready to use fileserver solution with web interface.

So I'm working on a similar setup with an ancient desktop my in-laws were getting rid of. I installed OpenMediaVault directly to the hard drive (it's so old that I assume it wouldn't work too well as a hypervisor), with a 4TB external HDD attached. OMV supports Docker by means of a plug-in and I'm running a Jellyfin container with no issues at all. I'm still manually downloading everything to the HDD but *arr containers are my next step, as well as setting up a gluetun container to route all that through a VPN.

That is possible (it's automated to a certain extent). It also depends on the NAS OS. Unraid, for example, can work with drives of different sizes while using the largest one for parity. TrueNAS uses ZFS so you won't be able to just add a drive to your RAIDZ and expand it. There's also openmediavault: https://www.openmediavault.org/ that uses Linux Software RAID and you can add a new drive there but you can't combine drives of different sizes. And there's also Starwinds NAS that supports both Linux Software RAID and ZFS: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas. Plus, I would avoid SMR drives in RAID: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/

I'd put it like that: if you have a spare PC, then it's definitely worth trying. I would also look into openmediavault (minimal RAM needs): https://www.openmediavault.org/ and Starwinds NAS (supports both ZFS and Linux software RAID): https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas