After something of a homelab hiatus, I’m back at it in full force. Although I’ve had the hardware for a while, I’d been putting off migrating my Plex/Arr stack (and its ever-growing media library) from my Dell R730 Proxmox server to my DIY Unraid NAS. The Dell has “only” about 12 TB of storage. My NAS? Already at 30 TB and climbing. The migration had to happen—it was just a matter of time and motivation. Mostly motivation.
I’ve finally gotten more comfortable with Unraid and its Docker management. Honestly, it makes container setup almost too easy compared to the “hard way” I was used to in Proxmox: Docker LXCs or VMs, hand-written Compose files, and a mix of Homepage, Uptime Kuma, and Gotify for service visibility.
Plex/Arr on Unraid
I spun up containers for the usual suspects:
- Plex
- Radarr, Sonarr, Readarr
- Bazarr
- Overseerr
- SABnzbd
- Tautulli
- Jellyfin
Getting them running on Unraid was straightforward. The real work came in path mapping and making sure each service could talk to the others. That part’s always a puzzle.
Then came the real fun: moving the actual media library. Thank goodness for ChatGPT. I’m still a novice on the Linux CLI, and it’s been like a cheat code. But even the best cheat codes sometimes glitch.
I asked it to help me reorganize my library based on the TRaSH guides. It got mostly right… but “mostly” isn’t good enough when your entire directory structure depends on it. I learned that the hard way. I ended up moving the library twice: first from Proxmox to Unraid, then again into a TRaSH-compliant structure. Painful, but worth it. To ChatGPT’s credit, it redeemed itself by helping me power through the second migration with some slick command-line magic.
GPUs and Transcoding
With my RackOwl 4U server case, I had plenty of room to install two GPUs: an RTX 1060 and RTX 1070 (both Marketplace finds). Right now:
- Plex is using the 1060 for transcoding (though it hardly needs it—most of my content is direct play).
- Jellyfin is using the Intel iGPU.
Unfortunately, Jellyfin continues to disappoint. I love its open-source nature and clean UI, but playback has been jittery and unreliable. Passing through the iGPU has helped a bit, and I’ve switched routing to a Traefik LXC on Proxmox instead of a Cloudflare tunnel. Time will tell if this stabilizes it.
Service Migration and LXCs
Since I was already moving Plex/Arr off an Ubuntu VM, I decided to go one step further: splitting my “everything-in-one” Docker LXC into smaller, dedicated LXCs.
So far, I’ve moved:
- Cloudflared
- Cloudflare-DDNS
- Gotify
- Homepage
And spun up new LXCs for:
- Traefik
- WireGuard
- Rustdesk
Is this “better” than a single Docker LXC with Portainer? Hard to say. Dedicated LXCs feel lighter and cleaner to me, so that’s the direction I’m heading for now. Ask me again in six months—I might change my mind and consolidate everything back again.
Still left on my to-do list:
- Move Uptime Kuma and Grafana
- Rework YAML for Homepage
Next Steps: Remote Gaming and More
That leaves the RTX 1070. The plan is to pass it through to a Windows 11 Pro VM on Unraid for remote game streaming with Parsec. In theory, that means I can play Windows games on my MacBook. In practice? We’ll see.
I tested it briefly, but my i5-9600T CPU was holding things back. Six cores just isn’t enough when you’re splitting 3-and-3 between Unraid and a VM. Even basic Windows updates pegged the cores assigned to the VM.
Solution: I’ve got an i9-9900K on the way. With 8 cores / 16 threads, I’ll be able to split resources more intelligently—dedicate 8 threads to Unraid, 8 to Windows, and still have the iGPU free for Jellyfin. That should open the door for light-duty remote gaming.
Other projects in the queue:
- Get Rustdesk fully working on Proxmox
- Decide whether to ditch the Cloudflare tunnel entirely in favor of Traefik
- Experiment with Pterodactyl for Minecraft server hosting
- Repurpose the Dell R730’s newfound capacity
Final Thoughts
If it isn’t obvious, the homelab bug has bitten me again. Tinkering with this setup has been fun, frustrating, and rewarding all at once. With ChatGPT acting like my sidekick, I feel like I’ve got superpowers.
If you made it this far—thank you! And if you’re self-hosting anything of your own, I’d love to hear about it in the comments (once I migrate those, too).