Hey everyone long time lurker here, but I’ve finally made the plunge into my first home lab. I upgraded my gaming rig and, instead of immediately selling my old parts, decided to set it up as a little home server.

Parts:

• Ryzen 9 3900x
• MSI MPG X570 Motherboard
• 32 GB DDR4 3200 RAM
• Gigabyte GTX 1080 Turbo OC
• 500 GB Samsung 980 Pro boot drive
• 250 GB SSD
• 2x 8TB Seagate IronWolf NAS HDDs

After doing some research, I decided that building out a NAS and setting up Plex/Jellyfin (recommendation?) is my primary goal right now with basic virtualization/docker support, I went with TrueNas Scale. I got a pretty good deal on the two HDDs, but they haven’t yet arrived. In the meantime, I went ahead and set up Scale to start messing around and boy do I feel like a noob.

Since I’m still waiting on the drives, I was able to set up some testing storage and get a feel for putting together Datesets and Shares - all fairly intuitive. Next, I wanted to spin up a VM, but hit a snag when Scale reported that my GPU had to be used by the host and could not be used for VMs. Unfortunately, the 3900x does not have onboard graphics, but there’s no way that Scale should need/use the 1080 to its fullest extent, will it?

After some Googling, I found that this is by design and not necessarily a bug according to iX and similarly Apps cannot use the GPU for the same reason. This made me wonder if Scale was the right solution for me after all. I’m not ready to double down and buy dedicated hardware and was really hoping to use what I had. I thought about maybe selling my 3900x and getting something with integrated graphics, but it’s a good chip and I figured it would be fun to mess around with.

What does everyone think? I did see that running Proxomox would allow me to do essentially the same thing as Scale, just with everything virtualized, but was also reading that it was a bit harder to get into.