This is the first part of Jellyfin at home. By the end of it Jellyfin
12 is running on my Proxmox server, it answers in a browser, and the
first library is in. The parts after this one are about naming the
files so Jellyfin recognises them, hardware transcoding, apps and remote
access, and backups and upgrades.
This is my own Jellyfin server being built, not a demo. I write down
what I did, including what I would do differently.
This is the fourth part of Proxmox from scratch. In part 2 and part 3 we created a virtual machine and a container, and both times I put their disks on a storage called vmdatanvme and promised to explain it later. This is later.
The post has two halves. The first is a tour: how Proxmox thinks about storage, and the kinds it can use, from a folder on the server’s own disk to Ceph spread over several servers. The second is what I do on my own servers, and here there is a twist. In part 7 my servers become a cluster, and in part 8 guests move between them. For that to work, the storage has to be set up the same way on every server, and that is easiest to get right now, before there is a cluster.
My main Proxmox server is called phoebe. It is a Lenovo Tiny PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 3400GE processor and 64 GB of RAM, and it runs a couple of LXC containers (Nextcloud among them) and a few virtual machines.
Its storage used to be an NVMe drive for booting and two spinning drives in an OpenZFS mirror: a 4 TB 2.5" hard disk drive inside the case and an 8 TB external drive connected via USB 3. That gave 4 TB of usable space, as the smallest drive in a mirror dictates the capacity.
Most posts about backup explain the 3-2-1 rule and then show a setup that follows it. I can’t write that post yet. What I can do is go through the rule, hold my own homelab up against it, and show where it falls short today.
The 3-2-1 rule, briefly
Backblaze puts the rule in one sentence: “keep three copies of your data on two different media with one copy off-site” [1]. The three copies include the original, so it is the data you work on plus two more [1]. “Two different media” comes from the time of tape and CDs. Today Backblaze reads it as two different devices [1]. Off-site means a place that a fire, a burglary or a lightning strike at home doesn’t reach.
This is the first part of Proxmox from scratch. By the end of it you
have a server running Proxmox Virtual Environment, reachable from a
browser and up to date. The following parts build on it: virtual
machines, containers, storage, networking and backups.
Everything here is done on Proxmox VE 9.2, which came out in May 2026
[7]. If you find an older guide for version 8, be aware that
8 stopped getting security updates on 31 August 2026 [7].
Some of my family’s data resides on a ZFS pool made up of 4 disks that are mirrored two and two. This data has been offline for a little while and I need to reconnect it to look through and reorganise our data storage. The YouTube video futher down this article documents my endeavours to get to these files and data
In this first part I will be looking at the computer I intend to use for this task and I install TrueNAS Scale. The drives are already in the server but I may need to reorganise the hardware a bit.
It is time for taking stock of my servers. My setup has evolved a bit, but not as well planned as I would like it to have. I currently have 4 servers - 5 if you count my Linode/Akamai VPS but only one of them is actual dedicated server hardware.
Servers as of February 2024
Server number 1 is a Raspberry Pi 4B 2 GB running my Home Assistant and Unifi controller. This boots off a 2.5" 250 GB SSD connected via USB.
Having a Home Server enables you to host locally your files and services. It might save you some money subscribing to paid (cloud) solutions. And enable you to try out cool things like containers and Virtual Machines. In this post I will document how I setup my current Home Server. I am using an old HP Proliant ML150 G6 I was given. This is a 5U tower server from 2009 with a Dual CPU motherboard.
