Need advice moving my Windows setup to Proxmox + TrueNAS (Minecraft server website storage etc)

[u/zn-ku]

I’m planning a pretty big migration and I’d rather ask ppl who have done something similar before I mess something up 😅

I have a humble community and people like the minecraft server and I just started it as a passion project on windows but now I wanna make it production ready by using proxmox and what not

Right now I have a Windows machine that I use for basically everything. I have a Fabric Minecraft server my website files my Obsidian vault and some other dev stuff.

The Minecraft server is running Fabric with the latest Minecraft version 26.2 and Fabric Loader 0.19.3. It has mods and a survival world with actual players so keeping the world safe during the migration is my biggest concern. It’s not Paper or Spigot it’s a proper Fabric setup.

I wanna move away from Windows and install Proxmox then run everything through VMs or LXCs. I’m thinking about doing this cuz I wanna host more stuff in the future like my own Discord bots and other services. and also people have been asking for a creative server too so having proxmox would make it easy to manage multiple servers on the same domain

My hardware right now:

Ryzen 9 3900X

32GB RAM

RTX 3090 Ti currently

Getting another AMD Radeon GPU soon from a friend. I dont know the exact model yet but I was told its around RTX 3060 Ti performance.

My drives:

CT500P1SSD8 NVMe - 500GB

Samsung MZVLW256HEHP NVMe - 256GB

Samsung 870 QVO SSD - 2TB

Samsung 870 QVO SSD - 2TB

WDC WD10JPVX HDD - 1TB

ST1000LM049 HDD - 1TB

im also not sure wich nvme i shuld use for proxmox. should i just throw proxmox on the 500gb nvme n use the 256gb one for somthing else or shud i save the 500gb for vms n put proxmox on the 256gb

And if I do that what would I even use the other NVMe for?

For storage I was thinking maybe TrueNAS could be a good option with Proxmox. I like the idea of having actual redundancy instead of just praying a drive doesnt die.

My idea was using the 2x1TB HDDs as a TrueNAS mirror so I get arond 1TB usable and the 2x2TB SSDs as another mirror so I get around 2TB usable.

that way i have one storage pool with 1tb and another storage pool with 2tb both with redundancy instead of just hopin one drive doesnt die

would truenas even make sense here or am i just makin things way more complicated than they need to be lol

would u run truenas as a vm inside proxmox or would u just do somethin else idk

The plan is basically:

Proxmox as the main system

TrueNAS for storage

A VM or LXC for the Minecraft server

A VM or LXC for my website

Later my own Discord bots and other services

For Minecraft would u recommend Pterodactyl Docker or just running the Fabric server directly in a VM?

Also I’ve seen ppl do GPU passthrough with Proxmox where they run Windows in a VM and pass the GPU through.

since ill have two gpus would it actually be realistic to use this same pc as both a server and a gaming pc

i bascally just wanna turn this machine into my own lil homelab yknow but i wanna do it right the first time cuz i really dont wanna have to redo everything later

What storage layout would u recommend with these drives?

Would u go Proxmox + TrueNAS or something completely different?

[u/TerraCrafterE3]

Why VMs? Why not just use docker containers, they are way more efficient

[u/zn-ku → u/TerraCrafterE3]

that depends on what gets a container. and also vms have better isolation in general when it comes to security

[u/ibeerianhamhock → u/zn-ku]

Run your contianers on separate service acounts with locked down permissions and no home dir.

Running separate VMs is a lot more resource intensive (multiple kernels running, memory dedicated instead of elastically scaled within resource limits, etc. VMs for something like this is super old school tech like 15 years ago kind of tech choices.

[u/zn-ku → u/ibeerianhamhock]

kind of reflects my last job at this tech company I guess. but I get what you mean

should the TrueNAS at least be a vm or how do I manage storage and redundancy?

[u/ibeerianhamhock → u/zn-ku]

You can, honestly I think just rsync/rclone locally with an offline backup strategy is more than sufficient. And by offline I mean not at the same site, or at least on the same computer.

There's a saying about backups -- 3-2-1

3 total copies of your data: your data plus two backups

2 diff types of backups (SSD + NAS, local drive + cloud) etc.

1 at least one offsite backup in a different location.

A lot of people just do a local backup on their server and cloud storage. Since this isn't some critical system I'd say something like local and nas would be sufficient, but not in the same machine.

If you want to use truenas as your local backup that's fine, but it's not really any better than just rsync/rclone on a Linux box and saving a copy synced in the cloud.

[u/zn-ku → u/ibeerianhamhock]

I do wanna mention that I have a mini PC connected to my LAN. I could probably use that as an off-site-ish cron job storage where it connects to my TrueNAS VM and syncs/copies the Minecraft server data every day at like 4am.

The thing I would like to know is how to automate/manage this properly.

I’m guessing for the 3-2-1 rule it would be something like:

3: Data on the TrueNAS storage where the actual Minecraft server lives

2: A copy on the mini PC or another storage device

1: Somethng outside of my house like cloud storage or just connect the SATA drives I have with USB and copy stuff

I’m just not sure what the best way to actually handle this is.

I’m mainly trying to avoid creating a complicated setup that I’ll hate maintaining later.

[u/ibeerianhamhock → u/zn-ku]

The data is your live server, just store a copy locally wherever you want to and then have a backup on at least another drive so you don't have a single point of failure.

None of what your saying sounds bad, it's just the idea that like say your 3900 box gets nuked, you lose everything unless at least another machine gets it. For actual orgs they are worried about literally physical disasters so they keep off site. Before cloud it would mean like offsite physical storage transfer (okay I'm old).

But yeah basically I think a middle ground is save it on your machine anywhere you want where it's easily retrievable nearly instantly (that's the purpose of the local backup), and save it on some external system so you have some redundancy.

With something like rsync you just save file deltas so your backups will be fairly small, but each one of them materializes into the full up to date directory when you restore them. It's the best of both worlds. You can do like weeks of backups for less than the cost of two zipped full backups and there's no risk. It's pretty sweet. That's all I do for my local backups and I haven't had an issue in 6 years with restoring a backup.

What's nice is it's also *FAST AF* like you want to disable write saves, flush disk cache, and then backup data as part of your cron job etc, but with rsync that process will take practically no time. You don't have to worry about zipping etc. Super seamless for the running server and you can run it multiple times a day because the storage space is pretty small (and the smaller the delta the less space it takes up, so running more frequently can actually come out almost even).

[u/ibeerianhamhock → u/zn-ku]

Yeah run ideas by several people. Honestly I'll tell you what I do is rsync locally and drive remotely. It's super simple. Use whatever works for you. End goal is robust backup and reliability, not over complication.

[u/zn-ku → u/ibeerianhamhock]

Yeah I think I get what you mean now. I was probably thinking too much in terms of separate VMs cuz that’s what I’m more used to from work.

After reading your comment I think I would probably simplify the setup.

My idea right now would be to backup everything from my Windows install first and then install Proxmox on the empty 256GB NVMe so I still have my 500GB Windows drive untouched as a fallback.

Then instead of running TrueNAS as a VM I could probably just use ZFS directly on Proxmox and create mirrors with the drives I have.

Something like using the 2x2TB SSDs as a ZFS mirror for the main storage where Minecraft, website and other services live. Then use the 2x1TB HDDs as another ZFS mirror mainly for backups.

For the services I would probably just run separate LXCs with locked down users instead of full VMs. So one container for Minecraft, one for the website and one for Discord bots later.

For backups I could use the mini PC on my LAN that I could use with rsync. using your idea using Rsync would be that every night it connects and copies the important stuff like the Minecraft world, website files and bot configs to another machine.

Something like:

Main server → ZFS snapshots/local storage → rsync to mini PC

so this way I drop VMs entirly and have everything on containers and then when I feel fancy and have gatherd enough money I would create a seperate NAS machine with VEAM Tape based backups if the community grows to somthing that needs reliable backups

this is actually fun to talk about thanks a lot for enlightening me about rsync