Personal Home Server

[WhtWlf6]

My first time on the forum so please forgive me if i dont explain whats what right away. I am wanting to install my own rack mount server system into my house for mass storage and program sharing. The reason for this is that i just want to do it and have access to the hardware, be it outdated, for a very good price. My issue is that other then slapping in drives, setting the raid, and installing windows server 2012 on every machine i dont know what i am doing. Honestly i would love to have one server control the others so as to not loose room to os but i dont know how to do that. All of the systems have network boot options but even that is unknown to my. Someone please help. I have looked online but everything just super glosses over the steps and that isnt a help at all.

If you want to know what units i have for this project just ask.

[kerradeph]

"Honestly i would love to have one server control the others so as to not loose room to os but i dont know how to do that."

If I'm reading that correctly, it sounds like you want to have multiple individual systems with a single OS controlling them all. That's not possible. You can cut down on overhead using something like FreeBSD to run network storage. Or using the core version of the OS. There's a version of 2016 that is similar to core but is then easily managed by a central server. 

 

Network boot is used for loading an extremely simple set of tools generally for stuff like deploying an image of an OS. 

[jkirkcaldy]

I think you would be better served by putting a very lightweight OS on the servers and connecting to the drives via SMB/CIFS/NFS or iSCSI depending on your needs or what's best for the files you're storing.

 

If you install windows server on all the physical servers you can control all of them from a windows 10 PC or from one of the servers directly so you wouldn't necessarily need to go into all the servers themselves once you are all setup.

 I'm not sure if this would require you to set up active directory or not.

 

You could look into something like freenas. That runs from a USB pen drive so you wouldn't lose any of the raw hard drive space for the OS. But if memory serves me correctly it can be very hungry for RAM. I seem to remember something like 1GB RAM for every 1TB storage. But I could be wrong.

[paddy-stone]

5 hours ago, jkirkcaldy said:

I think you would be better served by putting a very lightweight OS on the servers and connecting to the drives via SMB/CIFS/NFS or iSCSI depending on your needs or what's best for the files you're storing.

 

If you install windows server on all the physical servers you can control all of them from a windows 10 PC or from one of the servers directly so you wouldn't necessarily need to go into all the servers themselves once you are all setup.

 I'm not sure if this would require you to set up active directory or not.

 

You could look into something like freenas. That runs from a USB pen drive so you wouldn't lose any of the raw hard drive space for the OS. But if memory serves me correctly it can be very hungry for RAM. I seem to remember something like 1GB RAM for every 1TB storage. But I could be wrong.

With freenas it's recommended as you say IIRC. But I have a freenas build with 8GB ram currently with 10TB storage, and most of the time the usage is between 4-6GB maybe.

I would recommend freenas for sure, it's not perfect and has the occasional bug, but it's great for storage needs compared to some other solutions. And after the initial setup is done you use a webGUI to do everything, so don't need direct access to the servers.

 

OP, if you ONLY want storage server, not a homelab type setup, then I would definitely look into freenas.. if you want to play around with the servers with VMs AND have a home media server, then have a look at esxi, and then you can run freenas in a vm if you want.

[Mikensan]

What hardware do you have, and do you plan to buy anything?