* I know that there is a lot of text to read ( it’s not even written by an AI! ) but if you experts can spare me 5 minutes of your valuable time it would really mean a lot to me since, in the end, all of this is to ask best practices for a reliable new 2nd server and what is the best way to achieve that if you would have to “do it right” (IaaS?). Thank you if you’ll decide to help! *

Hi everybody, I’ve joined this sub something like 2-3 years ago and followed closely since then. Lots of inspiration for what became a full blown hobby so thank you for that (or maybe not since my wallet cries..)

INTRO

Anyway i’m writing you because, as i’ve said, it’s more than 2 years since i made my first serious NAS/Server (unraid) and last february it broke (hardware). It was then that i first actually noticed that i never trusted my server enough to switch everything -and therefore completely relying- on it. I’ve found that it didn’t disrupt my life at all: every book on calibre / immich photo collection / document on paperless had it’s own copy on icloud drive, and linux isos i could still download locally if necessary, vlc easily did the job while not as nice as plex of course. Thinking back all of this was (unconsciously) by design, since i never even tested my backup solutions and -while technically should have worked- it still seemed janky to me relying on s3 which i didn’t completely understand and various containers spread around, one of which on a raspberry pi with omv and a decade old hdd in a usb enclosure... All of this begged the question then: what am i spending all this money on electricity and all this time in setting it up if it’s for nothing?

Make no mistake now that is back online i’m still drawn to and enjoy tinkering with it so it has not been wasted time, but i realized that, at the time, I did it with a mindset of “ i need to get this working “ instead of “ i need to learn how this thing works and why “ and in the end now i have a janky server that kinda works, but i have no recall of most of what i did while setting it up, i forgot all the notions put in my mental RAM while setting up NAT in my vms, docker networks and even useless things like my backup system with 3 different containers 1 for s3 and 2 for 3-2-1... So practically now i have a server which is a hodgepodge of patch ups like an old pair of jeans and i decided it’s enough.

THE QUESTION

Now i’m setting up another server while the janky unraid one it’s still working and configured, so i want to use this new opportunity to learn the concepts deeply so stick to best practices even when it’s relatively complicated, document everything in the meantime for easy reference and maintenance, but most of all i want to have ““total”“ reliability so i can finally trust it enough to ditch everything else ( when this will be online the unraid one will be ditched and re-setup to complement the new one and join it in 3-2-1 or clustering ). To sum it up i just... want to do it only once and for good. How it all should be done, starting from when someone should start ( like router with vlans then server networking then backups? ). How should i go about that?

MY PLAN

At the moment my idea is to use proxmox to leverage it’s flexibility and features -including LXC and the easy backup with PBS- and in the future maybe ceph and probably HA. Is it possible to use IaaS to configure it? ( ansible? terraform? never used them so i’m talking out of my bu*t here ) Does it make sense?

Anyway I’ll leave it to you: how would you go about do it all from the start?

PS: I’m even thinking this may very much be part of my job in the future, that’s why i’ve decided to actually put the accent on the learning part of it. Still, you know as i know that the IT sector it’s immense, there is an almost neverending rabbit hole for every single “piece” of a homelab (networking, clustering, vm tecnologies etc ) so please keep in mind that i still mean to do it slowly and only to the extent which is necessary to make something work in a home lab in the beginning.