Just sharing for the sake of anyone curious to try it that I’ve had an absolutely fantastic experience running ROCK on Proxmox.
I used to run Roon on a QNAP NAS, but found it pretty sluggish due to the small processor, and there were just too many things running on that NAS. So took a deep breath and bought a NUC, excited to try ROCK. I liked lots about it, its ‘appliance’-ness, its web UI, easy log access. But other things were stupid, especially the inability to set password or permissions on a media drive. So I tried installing DietPi on the NUC after advice from this forum. This was OK for a bit, but I found it finicky to update and manage, and unfortunately this was the least stable option for me - I got dropouts, which I’ve never had before.
So about six months ago I installed Proxmox on the NUC, and installed a ROCK VM on it. It was very easy both to get started on Proxmox and to find suitable settings for ROCK.
ROCK has run, um, rock-solid ever since. And I’ve got around the media drive issue as I store media on a container on the same host, accessed by ROCK as a Samba share (i.e. a network drive, but in truth both machines are on the same physical hardware!). And I have tons of power leftover for things like Home Assistant, VPN gateways, DNS servers etc, all running fast and super super stable. And I haven’t spent a penny on any of it…
If anyone’s curious about such an option and if I can help with how I did this, of course, please feel free to ask…
Thanks! I used a NUC11PAHi7, because of two reasons: one, it was heavily reduced because it’s a little older, and two, it was on the ROCK compatible list (because when I got it, I intended to just run ROCK).
Since I got into Proxmox, I looked further into the newer NUCs and it’s not so simple - it looks like Proxmox isn’t yet ready to use Performance and Efficiency cores properly yet. On VMs you can allocate Performance cores, but LXCs are a bit random I think. So I think a fairly simple i7 with four or more similar cores like the i7 model I got is a good way to go (these appear as eight cores, due to HT). The only thing I did need a lot of was memory - I have 32GB, and use all of it! At some point I’ll increase this further. From my experience thus far, you can’t have too much - after all, VMs can’t share memory, and while they often can use little CPU resources a lot of the time and thus CPU resources can by dynamically allocated, memory use tends to be much more static (and large!).
I am currently running ubuntu server with Roon installed (and plex and a number of other bits and pieces). I am interested in moving to Proxmox (as one option). And I am trying to understand more. The main bit software that must run well is Roon. I currently run ubuntu server on a Intel NUC12WSHi7 with 16gb (2x8) PC4-25600(3200).
Hi there - sorry for the slow reply. I didn’t use a guide, but there’s a bit of info in this forum on it if you search for Proxmox. My general recommendation is that when setting up the VM that you match the system requirements of a classic ROCK NUC as ROCK is quite choosy about hardware. One thing that many people stumbled over on this forum is that Proxmox will moan if it doesn’t have an EFI disk. You don’t need to do this to install, but to stop it moaning, you can use this guide: OVMF/UEFI Boot Entries - Proxmox VE which worked perfectly for me. Edit: I’ve also just remembered that ROCK has a quirk where it wants a USB keyboard (won’t accept VNC input) during setup. So you’ll need to connect a USB keyboard and ‘passthrough’ the keyboard to the VM during install. You can disconnect it and permanently remove it from the VM once it’s installed, though, you’ll never need it again.
In terms of setting up Proxmox, I used the M2 drive of the NUC as a ZFS storage for the VMs and LXCs, and the SSD as an additional ZFS storage pool. There are lots of guides out there for setting up Proxmox, and my recommendation is don’t overcomplicate to begin with! You won’t need clusters or multiple NICs, and if you do want them, you can always add them later - it’s easy to start simple.
One thing to say though, I think it might be worth upgrading memory depending on your needs - you’ll be allocating only a subset of that 16GB to the Roon VM after all.