G'day
So as by the title, I'm planning to build my home network which will store a whole bunch of crap.
My current rough plan is laid as following
Main storage server( in raid 5 probably) gets synced to an unraided NAS (acting as a backup/redundancy) and anything I need a hard backup of (bank statements etc) will also get backed up onto an external drive that is offsite.
My main question is related to software.
Am I better off just using VMWare as an OS for the main storage server and just running VMs seeing as I would also like to host some small game servers (local, no more than 5 people) as well as file storage?
Also, hypothetically say I have 2 raid cards with 8 drives each, hardware raid 5 and I software stripe them together (for like raid 50), will this RAID setup also be read by a new VM trying to access the drives?
Would FreeNAS be a good solution for the unraided NAS? all it needs to do is to actively sync to the main server in case something gets deleted off the main server and I need a backup?
If I do go down the route of VMWare for the main server, should I use a windows VM to handle to storage and raiding aspect of it? What are VMs would you recommend I run?
Thanks for reading and any advice or articles I should read would be greatly appreciated, I am very much a noob when it comes to the software side of networking.