Jump to content

Home server questions

I've currently got a rackmounted Dell PowerEdge C6100. It's a 4 node server with each node being equiped with 2 Xeons and 8GB of RAM so it was easy to host a file server on one node and other services on other nodes. But even with lower RPM fans it can still be quite loud with a decent load on it. It's been running like this in my room for a couple of years and it's never really bothered me but the fans would ramp up to max for no reason from time to time and that was quite annoying. I'm going to be building a new PC soon so I was thinking about re-purposing my old PC as my home server. It's got an i7-4790k and 2x8GB of 2133Mhz (OC) RAM so the specs should be fine. I intend to host a NAS on it with FreeNAS and perhaps a game server or two (probably being a minecraft server to play on with friends and some other server in the future). What would be the best way of doing this? Running the servers off of FreeNAS directly or perhaps using virtual machines? If it's the latter how do I best go about setting up virtual machines for this purpose?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

FreeNAS has the bhyve hypervisor built in which you can use to host a VM for some game servers. I have no experience with FreeNAS though I imagine it's not overly complicated and there are probably guides out there.

[Out-of-date] Want to learn how to make your own custom Windows 10 image?

 

Desktop: AMD R9 3900X | ASUS ROG Strix X570-F | Radeon RX 5700 XT | EVGA GTX 1080 SC | 32GB Trident Z Neo 3600MHz | 1TB 970 EVO | 256GB 840 EVO | 960GB Corsair Force LE | EVGA G2 850W | Phanteks P400S

Laptop: Intel M-5Y10c | Intel HD Graphics | 8GB RAM | 250GB Micron SSD | Asus UX305FA

Server 01: Intel Xeon D 1541 | ASRock Rack D1541D4I-2L2T | 32GB Hynix ECC DDR4 | 4x8TB Western Digital HDDs | 32TB Raw 16TB Usable

Server 02: Intel i7 7700K | Gigabye Z170N Gaming5 | 16GB Trident Z 3200MHz

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

Watch the recent video were they constantly crash the server running minecraft. You're gonna wanna VM. Or docker. I would start in the FreeNAS forum.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

This seems a little overkill. I use a Dell TowerEdge T100 8GB DDR2, XEON machine from 2009 for my NAS, Domain Controler, Webpage among other things. Why don't you sell the PC and see if you can just get a cheaper 16gb xeon machine?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

On 12/4/2019 at 8:13 PM, sa-mm-on said:

This seems a little overkill. I use a Dell TowerEdge T100 8GB DDR2, XEON machine from 2009 for my NAS, Domain Controler, Webpage among other things. Why don't you sell the PC and see if you can just get a cheaper 16gb xeon machine?

That's another idea I could use. I was initially gonna try and build a tower server but the cost just wasn't worth it. The benefit of keeping my PC is that I can always revert back to the old server and still use this one as a normal Windows system. PC/Server hardware isn't exactly cheap around here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

Modded minecraft server can get pretty demanding (wanting faster single core + loads of RAM).

 

Anywho, I would get a linux VM going on FreeNAS, install docker, and go nuts. Jails are fine and dandy, but if you're new to the world of linux/freeBSD - ubuntu + docker = widely supported.  You'll find more stuff on the internet on getting it setup. 

 

Damn near everything has been container-ized, so it will make your life easy. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×