First of all, it’s definitely possible to use a one-for-all machine.
I would recommend to use virtualization for this.
But you have to be aware, that all your systems will rely on this single hardware.
Another thing is, it might be more complex with virtualization, but it’s possible to break through from one vm to another (and if not using virtualization at all, it’s even more simple to hack this single computer).
So, it’s no good idea to put the firewall on the same machine (but of course you could use a vm as a backup system).
I would recommend to use at least two computers, one for firewall/router, the other for “the rest”.
It’s no problem to run openHAB together with Samba, Apache/NGinx, Mediaserver, whatever, but for a neat and clean system these services should be separated, whether it’s a full virtualization (like xen, kvm, virtualbox, vmware, esxi) or a container system (like docker, lxc or OpenVZ).
When the system is growing up (yes, it does…) you might come to the point to get a second host to build a failover system - I’m at this point right now, and it hurts…
Thank you Udo , i need to give this more tghout,
can you tell me how your next setup will be maybe i will
try going there insted where i am trying to go
if you can please publish your specs… or at least a blue print
so maybe i can take exmaple
i think you have it all figure out
No, it’s work in progress… for now I’m testing proxmox. This is debian + kvm + lxc +qemu with zfs support. to build a failover cluster, you would have to use at minimum 3 machines, which is a bit of overkill for home environment. But it’s possible to use a web based interface for management, and one can define roles for users to set permissions for start/stop/create/destroy/… a vm. one can use templating for vm creation and other cool stuff, including automatic backups and restore points.
My “productive system” (well, it’s a home system) is debian based with xen server for virtualization, but I want to switch to proxmox sooner or later (definitely later… not enough time…)
