To SERVER or BUST!

GuruOfNothing · December 27, 2018

I purchased an HP Proliant DL380 G7 server with twin Zeon x5660 2.8Ghz processors and 72GiB ram. It also has 8-146 SAS drives on the factory sleds. I am looking to set it up at home and I have grandiose dreams and relatively little knowledge of how to get there. I am not looking for a "hold my hand" kind of tutorial but some suggestions as to what kind of direction I could roll with this here boat anchor. There is TONS of YouTube info and what not to learn from so I just need a proper nudge in the right direction. I currently have a Plex server (an old ass Dell tower that won't compute itself out of a wet paper bag on a good day) and a pile of random external drives holding about 5TB of media that could just randomly crap out at any time, as drives do from time to time. I had looked into a NAS standalone and am still not excited about the cost of that option. I would like to utilize this server for pick (any/none) of the following: NAS (maybe), some sort of hypervisor so I can play with different OS's and such, a plex server (or some sort of media streaming) I assume as a virtual machine, whole home ad blocking and whatever other nifty cool stuff I can come up with once it is operational. I would love to use it as a virtual video edit box if that is even possible since it has a crap ton of horsepower but I have a system I am using that works just fine.

I installed FreeNAS on it bare metal for giggles and have not taken the time to get very far into that rabbit hole. I was also looking at ESXI and Ubuntu server as I have seen a number of posts on that in my passing through. The bottom line of all this though is that I am doing this as a lab box and don't know what all will play together, what is stable and what this server setup will allow me to do without lots of rework. I don't have a problem with buying a different raid card as I understand the stock HP card is kind of a turd. As a matter of fact, on bootup, it only sees one drive (da0) and because I am green as grass with this so far, I don't know why that is yet. BTW... it is my understanding that this box will NOT run anything bigger than a 1.2TB drive so the max storage volume that can be put in there is 9.6TB and I am aware that building a RAID volume chops that up really fast depending on configuration (and I don't know what config would be best 'cuz, as I said... grass). I figured I could toss an 8 pack of 1.2TB SATA's in there and pray for the best. Or light a few hundred dollar bills on fire and come out ahead? IDK

And as far as the leaf blower level noise this thing *could* generate, I am not worried about it as it will be located in a big 'ol shipping container storage building on the property with a big 'ol UPS once my wife kicks me out of the house for making leaf blower level noise with it. That is going to be the server (clears throat) closet and man cave eventually anyway.

Edited December 27, 2018 by GuruOfNothing
Forgot some juicy details

Master Disaster · December 27, 2018

Quite honestly running anything other than a full blown server OS on a server that powerful is a waste imo.

Personally I'd run Windows Server on it and set it up as a domain controller so you have DNS control. Sharing media can be handled by Windows server very easily, you could also do an SMB file server as well plus setting up FTP access is easy. Finally Hyper-V could handle all your VM needs.

Pretty much all of this could be achieved using Linux server too but it's much more work and I don't think Linux can do domain control.

Electronics Wizardy · December 27, 2018

Id put a hypervisor on the host like proxmox. Proxmox is free, easy to use and well supported. Other options are esxi, hyper-v server, xcp-ng. But proxmox is great for this type of use.

You can run a nas on the host or in a conainter and everything else in a vm

If you want more drives you can get a sas external array for it.