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LMG Server Software

Rehmat

Hi there, from watching Linus's videos over the years he has mentioned that he has used FreeNAS, Unraid, GlusterFS on CentOS, and Windows server in his server room and server workflow. Any clear logical idea on how this all fits together and what his use case is for each software. I am trying to setup software for my own homelab to play around with enterprise software. Thanks.

Server 1:  CPU: i3 2100T  SSD: 840EVO MOBO: DQ67OW NIC: i340 -T4

Server 2:  CPU: Pentium D  MOBO: Dell Dimension 5150

Switch 1: Netgear GS108

Switch 2: Cisco 3500

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Best way really is to have a base HyperVisor and run everything else in virtual machines. 

 

That way, you can spin up different software quickly and see what you like. 

 

The two main options are VMWare ESXi and Windows HyperV. I'd recommend going for an ESXi base as it means you don't have to worry about managing the HyperV host on the domain (or off it). 

 

I currently have a Windows HyperV host as the base of my own setup and it's kind of a pain having Windows for the HyperVisor. ESXi is a bit better for installing it and then not touching it again. 

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I already have a homelab with Proxmox runnning in a cluster, I just wanted to see how a media production company configures their storage, what software and what protocols they use.

Server 1:  CPU: i3 2100T  SSD: 840EVO MOBO: DQ67OW NIC: i340 -T4

Server 2:  CPU: Pentium D  MOBO: Dell Dimension 5150

Switch 1: Netgear GS108

Switch 2: Cisco 3500

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I never got a clear understanding whether or not they run hypervisors at LMG. I think their only needs are storage (file shares) and rendering - so not much else.

 

They've shifted from one storage solution to another, though I'm not aware they ever used FreeNAS. Just GlusterFS for a short skinny and then unraid. Last I heard, they are overall just running unraid. He quickly moved away from GlusterFS once he had a node go down and required phone support to recover his data.

 

GlusterFS is a solution to spread out your storage for both redundancy and availability. You can slide the scale via configuration for which is more important. Any speed benefit is merely a side-effect and not the main objective (aside from storage being locally redundant). Think of it similar to a CDN.

 

FreeNAS is a general all purpose storage solution with a GUI backed by ZFS. A lot of storage solutions are offering ZFS because of the data integrity it offers. FreeNAS is well received because it's easy to use, offers many protocols, and has been proven as rock-solid.

 

unRaid is a general all purpose storage solution with a GUI with a focus on virtual machines. Their raid solution is built for fault tolerance while minimizing data loss at the cost of speed. It round-robins files between the disks, instead of writing a single file across many disks. Write speeds can be inflated when you're writing multiple files and the raid has multiple disks. Write speed can also be improved with a SSD buffer.

 

HyperV is a great solution if you just need VMs and not much ealse - free and point and click. Personally not a fan though.

ESXi is a great solution for a little more fine-tuning (especially networking) that can be done through the GUI. It also scales out very easily and quickly.

Proxmox is a mixture of the two in my opinion, lot of features but maybe you have to drop down to command line once in a while for certain things.

 

There is no cookie cutter answer for what solution works best for each field of work. Each business is unique in how they want to protect their data, meet customer needs, and lean on technology for certain capabilities. So in the end what you have is a box of legos in which you simply need to know which each piece does, and assemble your own castle.

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2 hours ago, Rehmat said:

I am trying to setup software for my own homelab to play around with enterprise software

LMG/LTT != enterprise ?

 

Actually though if you are interesting in working in the IT field LMG is not what you want to use as an education source, use it for entertainment which it's really good for.

 

Windows Server is used because there is replication software they use that only works on Windows and Window Server does SMB shares better than Linux does, if you want 10Gb or higher throughput per single client and don't want to have to do many performance tweaks on Linux and have higher CPU overhead.

 

GlusterFS is far cheaper than any Windows option for long term archive, same for Ceph, Swift and FreeNAS/ZFS.

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6 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

He quickly moved away from GlusterFS once he had a node go down and required phone support to recover his data.

That wasn't the Gluster server from what I remember, it was one of his others running 2 or 3 RAID cards and then he striped them in the OS (Windows Disk Manager I think, not sure). Wasn't a very resilient setup anyway. You wouldn't need to use that kind of configuration with Gluster.

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Just now, leadeater said:

That wasn't the Gluster server from what I remember, it was one of his others running 2 or 3 RAID cards and then he striped them in the OS (Windows Disk Manager I think, not sure). Wasn't a very resilient setup anyway. You wouldn't need to use that kind of configuration with Gluster.

What was he running on the 45 drive machine that went down a while back? I know his wannaco (or whatever the name is) went down a while back too - I think that one was their weird windows / card solution?

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oh I think I'm losing it, maybe it was the whonnock server I'm thinking of - I could've sword they had another server die that was running gluster and it was too hard for them to figure out (or maybe it was just the initial configuration)... 

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47 minutes ago, leadeater said:

LMG/LTT != enterprise ?

 

Actually though if you are interesting in working in the IT field LMG is not what you want to use as an education source, use it for entertainment which it's really good for.

 

Windows Server is used because there is replication software they use that only works on Windows and Window Server does SMB shares better than Linux does, if you want 10Gb or higher throughput per single client and don't want to have to do many performance tweaks on Linux and have higher CPU overhead.

 

GlusterFS is far cheaper than any Windows option for long term archive, same for Ceph, Swift and FreeNAS/ZFS.

I was only joking about LTT being enterprise. Lol. My homelab is more of a hobby to me than anything else at the moment. Was interersted to see what Linus decided to go with in the end. I think that ZFS ontop of Ubuntu 18.04TLS will do the trick alongside NFS over 10G

Server 1:  CPU: i3 2100T  SSD: 840EVO MOBO: DQ67OW NIC: i340 -T4

Server 2:  CPU: Pentium D  MOBO: Dell Dimension 5150

Switch 1: Netgear GS108

Switch 2: Cisco 3500

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