Most homelab posts are aspirational. They show you a pristine rack, perfectly labeled cables, and a services dashboard with everything green. What they don’t show you is the three containers that are broken and just sitting there, the drive that spun up three months ago and hasn’t been checked since, and the app you installed for a project you abandoned.

This is the honest version. Here’s exactly what’s running on my Unraid server right now, what I actually use, what’s just squatting RAM, and what I wish I’d done differently when I set it up.

The Hardware

My server is a custom build in a Fractal Design Node 804. It’s got an older Intel Xeon processor, 64GB of ECC RAM, and a mix of drive sizes that would give a proper storage admin a headache. Six data drives ranging from 4TB to 10TB, a 2TB parity drive, and two SSDs in the cache pool.

If I were building from scratch today I’d honestly consider something like the LincStation N1, which ships with an Unraid license already baked in. It’s not a powerhouse, but if your workload is mostly storage and light Docker containers it’s a cleaner starting point than my Frankenserver.

Cooling matters more than people think. I’ve had drives run 10 degrees cooler just from swapping case fans. The Noctua NF-A12x25 is overkill for noise-sensitive setups but it’s the best 120mm fan you can buy and it runs practically silent under normal load.

The Docker Stack

Unraid’s Docker integration is what made me switch from a bare Debian box three years ago. No YAML files to maintain, no compose headaches, just a UI that works. Here’s what’s actually running:

Plex – The anchor tenant. Everything else exists partly to support Plex or to not interfere with Plex. I’ve got about 8TB of media organized by Radarr and Sonarr, and the server transcodes 4K without breaking a sweat.

Radarr + Sonarr + Prowlarr – The automation trio. Once you set these up and forget about them, you realize how much time you used to waste manually managing media. Prowlarr replaced Jackett for me about a year ago and I haven’t looked back.

Jellyfin – Running alongside Plex as a backup and for family members who don’t want to deal with Plex accounts. It’s gotten genuinely good. The hardware transcoding support is solid.

Nextcloud – My Google Drive replacement. I’ve got about 200GB synced across three devices. The iOS client has improved dramatically. File sync still occasionally needs a kick to restart, which is annoying, but it’s not something I’d trade back.

Vaultwarden – Self-hosted Bitwarden server. This one is load-bearing for my whole family. It syncs to all our devices, and I export a backup every week automatically. If this goes down, everyone loses their passwords. So it gets the most attention.

Immich – Photo management, Google Photos replacement. This one has leveled up fast. Face recognition, location mapping, albums, sharing – it does everything. My wife was skeptical until she saw the mobile app. Now she uses it daily.

Home Assistant – Running in a dedicated VM, not Docker. More on this in a separate post, but it needs the full VM treatment for Zigbee USB passthrough to work reliably.

Ollama + Open WebUI – Local LLM server. This is the new addition that’s gotten the most tinkering. I run Llama 3.1 8B for quick tasks and Llama 3.1 70B quantized for anything that needs real reasoning. It uses a lot of RAM.

Uptime Kuma – Monitoring dashboard for all my services. Gets a ping every 60 seconds, sends me a Telegram message if anything goes down. Simple and reliable.

Nginx Proxy Manager – Handles all my reverse proxy routing and SSL certificates. Every service gets a clean subdomain. More on this in a dedicated post.

The VMs

Unraid’s VM manager runs on KVM under the hood. I’ve got three VMs currently:

Home Assistant OS – The whole thing runs in a VM with USB passthrough for my Zigbee stick. This is the right way to run HA on Unraid. Don’t put it in Docker unless you enjoy pain.

Windows 11 – For gaming sessions when I want to play something on the living room TV over Moonlight/Sunshine streaming. It sits idle most of the time but fires up fast when I need it.

Ubuntu dev box – A clean Linux environment for projects I don’t want running on my Mac. Docker experiments, random builds, things I might blow up. This VM gets nuked and rebuilt every few months.

What’s Broken and Just Sitting There

Authentik – I tried to set up proper SSO across all my services. Got it halfway working, then hit a wall with Nextcloud integration, and it’s been sitting broken for four months. Every time I open the UI I feel vaguely guilty.

Portainer – Installed it to manage Docker on a second machine. The second machine went away. Portainer is still there doing nothing.

A Minecraft server I set up for my kid in 2024 and haven’t touched since. It’s using 2GB of RAM.

What I’d Do Differently

I’d start with a UPS from day one. I added one later and it caught two power blips in the first month. An unexpected shutdown mid-parity check is a bad day. Get a good unit – I use an APC BX1500M and it’s been rock solid.

I’d also plan my cache drive setup before I needed to expand it. I added the second SSD to the cache pool nine months in, which meant a parity rebuild and a couple hours of anxiety. Plan for two cache drives from the start.

The other thing – document everything. Which port maps to which service, why you chose that configuration, what that weird env variable does. I have a plaintext file for this now. It saved me twice last month when I was troubleshooting something I’d set up a year ago.

What’s Next

The next post goes deep on Ollama: how I set it up on Unraid, what I learned the hard way about GPU passthrough, and which models are actually worth running locally versus just using the API. That one’s coming Thursday.

Products mentioned in this post:

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