Seeking advice for home server

Mr_Ozzie · September 29, 2018

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.

Quinten Verhelst · September 29, 2018

Maybe use unraid for the first server, covers storage and you can set up a couple of VM's for your game servers, as for the second server, i'm currently just using a windows server running a great program called 'bvckup2' . Seems an easy solution but works great for me

dalekphalm · September 30, 2018

On 9/29/2018 at 1:59 AM, Mr_Ozzie said:

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.

This is not an inherently bad plan. It's a good foundation.

On 9/29/2018 at 1:59 AM, Mr_Ozzie said:

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?

This is how I personally run my home server - I use ESXi as the base OS (Type 1 Hypervisor), and then I have 1x FreeNAS VM for my storage server, and 3x Windows VM's for various other tasks.

Basically you want to choose either:

1. A Type 1 Hypervisor (Which is an OS that runs directly on your hardware and is designed around allowing VM management as the primary function of the OS)

2. A Storage Server OS that also doubles as a Hypervisor (Examples: unRAID, FreeNAS, Proxmox, Windows, etc)

Note: some OS's will fall into both categories.

On 9/29/2018 at 1:59 AM, Mr_Ozzie said:

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?

Personally I would NOT do this. Mixing Hardware RAID w/ Software RAID on top of it, is just asking for trouble. You should pick one or the other and stick with it. You'd be better off either having one single RAID Card large enough to access all drives, or a RAID Card + a SAS Expander, enabling the single (smaller) RAID Card to assign all drives into the pool you want.

On 9/29/2018 at 1:59 AM, Mr_Ozzie said:

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?

When you say "unraided", please explain. How do you imagine the drive setup on the FreeNAS server? There's nothing wrong with FreeNAS - it's a great File Server OS, and even has some VM capabilities (though not as robust as, say, ESXi).

With that in mind, the primary benefit of FreeNAS is ZFS "raid-like" arrays. If you're not utilizing ZFS arrays, then I wouldn't bother with FreeNAS.

But I also question why you would specifically want the backup server unraided? Of course, if all your backup needs fit onto a single large HDD, that's great. But I would be skeptical (Unless you're simply not backing up all your data, on purpose).

Anyway, if you're just backing up to a single HDD, and everything can fit? FreeNAS would be fine, but also overkill. A basic Linux or Windows install would also fill this gap easily.

On 9/29/2018 at 1:59 AM, Mr_Ozzie said:

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?

You certainly can use Windows as the Storage Server - nothing wrong with that. Many here use FreeNAS for that purpose, but FreeNAS has some recommended requirements.

FreeNAS needs direct access to the physical HDD's to work best. So if you're using a Hardware RAID Card, the virtual drive that is presented to FreeNAS does not allow that low level access it wants. Not to mention that VM software creates another level on top of that, for the OS to interpret.

So to get around that, FreeNAS VM setups use something called "PCI Passthrough", which allows the VM OS (ESXi, for example) to "pass" a piece of hardware directly to the VM. This fools the VM into thinking it's connected to that hardware as if it was a bare metal non-VM install.

The problem with PCI Passthrough is that it requires hardware support (CPU + motherboard) - for Intel, this is "VT-d", and AMD has "AMD-Vi". So check your CPU specs (Basically any Xeon will support VT-d, for example), if you intend on using this.

However, this is only stage one of getting FreeNAS to work as a VM. The other thing you need to do is remove the Hardware RAID Card from the build, and replace it with a Hardware HBA Card (Host Bus Adapter), which looks identical to a RAID Card, but without the battery or RAM. Alternatively, you can flash a Hardware RAID Card into "IT" mode ("IT" - Initiator Target, which basically just shuts off the RAID functionality internally and passes the drives over directly).

There are numerous guides on how to flash some of the popular RAID cards into IT mode.

So VT-d + HBA Card, will allow you to use FreeNAS properly in a VM, as your storage server.

But that's pretty complicated, and requires some specific planning.

Alternatives to ESXi + FreeNAS VM:

1. Proxmox - Proxmox is a Hypervisor OS based on Linux KVM. The Benefit of Proxmox is that it supports ZFS and creating Software RAID arrays, along with sharing network drives. Proxmox can work as your File Server and your Hypervisor. Note: You'd still want an HBA unless the motherboard has enough SATA Ports (or a RAID Card in IT mode), but you wouldn't need Hardware PCI Passthrough support, or anything.

2. unRAID - the biggest downside to unRAID is that it costs money, when other solutions don't. It has software RAID support, File Server/network sharing, and VM support. It's similar to Proxmox or FreeNAS in the basic features it supports, but does it in different ways. It's supposed to be easier to use, but may not perform as well as other solutions.

3. Windows - just use Windows. Windows works fine with Hardware RAID arrays, or you can use Storage Spaces (Windows version of something like ZFS) for Software RAID. You can also use Hyper-V for VM's. If you use Windows Server, these functions also have more features (or easier to use GUI to configure/manage).

There may be other options but these are some of the obvious ones.

On 9/29/2018 at 1:59 AM, Mr_Ozzie said:

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.

No worries - there's a lot of planning to do before you even buy any hardware, and the planning will actually decide a lot of what you will need to buy.