OpenMediaVault VS Portainer

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.

The second is storage. If you need any of the storage sharing, deploy NAS OS as the VM in proxmox, like Starwinds SAN and NAS (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas) or OMV (https://www.openmediavault.org/), or TrueNAS (https://www.truenas.com/). As you mentioned, you need to cross-flash the perc into IT mode and pass through the controller into VM, but you need a separate from the controller drive for proxmox to be able to PCI-E passthrough the card into VM. Then, configure software RAID and reshare the storage to the proxmox via NFS/iSCSI (that will improve your skills in storage stack and storage protocols).

If you want all that in one, I would go with Proxmox and everything else as VMs or containers on it. NAS can also be run as a VM. For example, Starwinds NAS: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas or openmediavault: https://www.openmediavault.org/. I would try to add more RAM for sure though.

I have Open Media Vault installed on a Raspberry PI. I choose that because also wanted to run some docker images and wanted something cheap. However, if you’re not tech savvy I recommend Synology.

Open Media Vault

To build a NAS, you can set up a Linux VM with LVM, ZFS, Btrfs or deploy a pre-built solution like Openmediavault https://www.openmediavault.org/, EasyNAS https://easynas.org/, Starwinds SAN&NAS https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas-free to passthrough the direct-attached storage to NAS VM, create a pool, and expose it to your network as SMB or NFS file shares, or iSCSI storage.

1) VMs are out of the question. Your CPU is too old to run VMs. 2) This could be a very powerful firewall, router, and privacy cleanser. Check out OPNsense or pfSense 3) Could definitely run as a NAS! Not a powerful one. An easy one to get started with is Open Media Vault.

Unless you've got another project in mind for your Pi4 (and who doesn't?), I enjoyed (mostly) my time running an OpenMediaVault machine (I was running Plex and a couple of minecraft servers on it). Here's a guide for installing pihole on an OMV machine, and this guy has a TON of useful tutorial videos around all kinds of neat stuff you can do with OMV (as well as initial setup/config vids).

I would just go with Proxmox and run Plex, game server and NAS as VMs. For a NAS, take a look at StarWinds SAN and NAS or TrueNAS Core if you want ZFS. 16GB of RAM might be a bit scarce for everything but still worth a shot. There's also openmediavault that requires minimum RAM.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).

The control panel is called Homepage. I like it more than Heimdall. To manage Docker I use Portainer.

Synology use a custom version of Docker in their NAS products, which we've noted has issues with environment variables. We have this issue open around it, but unfortunately we haven't been able to come up with a fix as of yet and Synology seem to be reluctant to engage with us on it.

Here are hundreds of others that did though: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/8452

Portainer is a container management tool that can be leveraged to build a PaaS environment. Its intuitive interface, multi-cloud support, and container orchestration features simplify the management of containers and services. Portainer allows you to monitor resource usage, manage container networks, and deploy applications with ease.

It depends on what tools you want to use. Ubuntu Server is totally sufficient for setting up a minecraft server. The manual way would look like like this on Ubuntu Server (you should use version 22.04 though). I have not tried it but this docker image could be good as well and you could use it with a WebUI like Portainer. If there is some non-command-line (or WebUI) tool you want to use, then use Ubuntu Desktop.