Benjamin_ONeal

I most always buy from Ebay, as I've never gotten broken hardware, and usually get really good deals on used parts (EVGA 1070 Ti for $285!).

I usually buy from Amazon.

welp the page is gone, so I must be too late to the party as usual

It's probably a 650 or similar card with a custom BIOS to make software think it's a 1080ti.

Excuse my poor drawing skills, but uh...

Doubt it's legit, Bob.

The seller only has rep from buying and that deal is way to good

should add though, for 10 000RMB (1477USD) you can buy or build a top end computer. I did and only used ~$800 AUD which i think is about 70c to us dollar. but it still stands and pre-built system with a card will do nicely.

any prebuilt pc say hp desktop with a graphics card added will do fine. you can go onto ebay and search for core i7 computer, core i7 being the processor. then get a gforce gtx 960 ish, cheep and simple do anything pc. Note: graphics cards are still a little expensive due to crypto miners so take your time and search, I'm always happy to help out.

you can make cifs shares in proxmox using samaba like any other linux distro in the command line.
 
In 5.2 that just came out they added support for doing this in the web dui.
 

Well technically we can't help out when it's pirated software so just don't say it is. Btw if you have school/college email address you can get a free legitimate license from Microsoft under the Microsoft Imagine program.

Yea Windows Server.
 
Not sure which you should use, I don't use Proxmox myself so can't give much insight in to it. Both will work, Proxmox may allow you to not have to create a VM for doing the SMB shares though.

If you want to use ESXi and only run a single server you've only got two options, hardware RAID or HBA passthrough to a VM to handle the storage then present that back to the ESXi host with either NFS or iSCSI.
 
Just don't put the storage VM itself on the datastore created using that VM, power it down and you'll never be able to turn i back on. Use a local disk for that VM.
 
What about Proxmox mdadm or ceph or gluster?

I found ESXi to be sub par at configuring VM's, as in the core assignment was wonky.  Granted I don't have much experience with it.  I'm under the impression that adding a disk to something other than jbod can only be done in windows storage spaces. Any kind of raid probably requires an entire array rebuild which is a pain in any OS.  JBOD and storage spaces are kind of the same thing as in it's just disks clumped together.
 
I am running windows server 2012 r2 with a raid 5 but all 6 of my drive bays are full so I don't have to worry about adding disks.

Then ESXi should work well as it is. Just create two datastores, one for each of those mirrors then pick which ever OS you want for the VM to host the file shares.
 
Install ESXi on a USB as well, that's the most common way it's done. Newer servers have dedicated SD card slots for that instead of using USB but same deal.

If you have a Windows license and your goal is to have some SMB network shares then I would use that. Windows does a good job and compatibility wise with other Windows systems it's the best you'll get. I've never been a fan of SAMBA under Linux for hosting SMB shares myself, being reverse engineered from the Windows implementation and lagging in features and stability of new features I just find it's not worth the hassle when you do have Windows as an option.

that would be plenty yes, if you start going above 20 or so devices maybe add more ram. PfSense isn't a program, it runs as it's own operating system based of FreeBSD, so you'd need to set up a full VM. Unless there's been an update that i'm not aware of which is entirely possible.

if you're planning on having both running on the same machine, I recommend virtualising the servers and turning the physical machine into a host, either using VMware ESXI (free version) or microsoft Hyper-V, you can then what resources each machine gets.

Yep, any router would work, this is how I had mine setup for 2 years, I had my ISPs modem with a lan cable going to an old PC running pfsense and then a switch connected to that. I wasn't able to replace my ISP router because they don't allow that (Sky UK) and it also doesn't have a modem only mode, so i had to use the DMZ, but that worked with no problems so you should be all good.

Your best bet would be to buy a separate wireless access point. The Ubiquiti AC lite are a good choice and aren't too expensive, they offer great coverage and very fast speeds. Then you would need to disable the WiFi on your router, put it into modem only mode. Connect the PfSense firewall to 1 lan port on the router, then run another lan cable from the pfsense box to the switch. If your router doesn't have a modem only mode, put the PfSense box's static IP address for the WAN connection into the DMZ section of your current router.
Any questions, please let me know.
Corban

There were firmware problems with this card originally.  Your tech is good so as long as your coolers are free of dust and there arn't any funny programs grabbing at the card Id say update the firmware and tweek a little so see if you can get the two to work together better.

I will add in case anyone ever reads this thread in the future that as a pretty "teched up" household I've never used any of the features that my managed switch offers. Link Aggregation, for example, requires I believe Windows Server to work as well as a managed switch.  I have no need to change the Spanning Tree protocol or create a VLAN etc.
 
TLDR: just buy a normal unmanaged switch unless you *know* you need a specific feature beyond plug-n-play.

There were firmware problems with this card originally.  Your tech is good so as long as your coolers are free of dust and there arn't any funny programs grabbing at the card Id say update the firmware and tweek a little so see if you can get the two to work together better.

The router still manages all the ip address, no matter what switch you have. Since you not doing things like vlans, lacp, and other advanced switch stuff, there is no use for such a switch in your use case.

Id personally spend the extra buck for a name brand box, these cheap ones can be pretty bad.

Do you know lots about networking?
 
For what you seem to be doing Id get this.https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-Ethernet-Unmanaged-Internet-Splitter/dp/B00KFD0SEA/ref=pd_lpo_vtph_147_tr_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=YZCQ9YHVGE89X8AS3VSQ
 
those rack mount mount switches are loud and use a good amount of power aswell.