Tried NAS... tried ROCK... tried DietPi... but now happy on PROXMOX

Tinkering
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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…

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Sounds cool! What NUC did you use? I’m just trying to get a sense of what works, especially ASUS. Thanks!

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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!).