Plex/Minecraft Server

[FurNaxx]

Currently I've been running been running plex on my main pc, and for the most part it hasn't been an issue but lately I've been running into the limits and can't game while watching certain streams so I want to build a server. I've also been running 2 minecraft servers on my spare PC, one is heavily modded and it pretty much requires 8gb of ram to itself, the other one is vanilla and is doing fine with 4gb but anytime I have company over I have to shut down the servers for the PC to be use able so I am just going to break down and build a server. I plan to run FreeNAS as my OS but I am undecided on the type of hardware I want to use. I want to use old server hardware from ebay but I don't know anything about the server industry so I'm not sure what I'm looking for or what would fit my needs. Is it worth my time or should I just build with consumer parts? If server parts, leave suggestions on cpus/motherboard

 

Also I should note that I most of my Plex media is in 4k, for two of my 4k tv's but I also often watch from my phone or 1080p kitchen TV. Usually up to 2 people watching at a time. So transcoding on 4k may be required at times.

[Votivee]

Budget?

 

I wouldn't go with old server gear. It will drive your electric bill through the roof and will probably be quite loud. Look into a used Ryzen 2700x possibly

[LIGISTX]

I would suggest looking at the freenas forum for that side of things. They can be.... a fickle bunch, but there is some amazing info.

 

I would recommend looking into running freenas under ESXi so you can spin up other VM's next to it. This is what I do, and I have a few Ubuntu server vm's running next to it. Just... there are some gotchas to watch out for, like you need an HBA to pass through the hypervisor to freenas so freenas can see the harddrives as bare metal, but that isn't hard or expensive. And ECC RAM isn't strictly required as many will lead you to believe. I run ECC, but that was a choice, not because its required. Many will say its a must, but somewhere.... ill never find it again, but one of the devs who created ZFS even said and explained why you don't. Also, most of the folks on the freenas forums use it in an actually deployed way, so, to them, its a job. And when a business is paying for it, yes, use ECC, don't be an idiot.

 

Anyways, I would check out this page. Wealth of info, and you will see me posting all over it as well for help with my current homelab in my sig haha.

 

https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/build-report-node-304-x10sdv-tln4f-esxi-freenas-aio.57116/

 

That will help you understand how the virtualization of it all works, the pitfalls, and will teach you A LOT if you just read through it, much more then I could ever regurgitate.

 

Hardware choices will be harder to narrow down, but I would advice you read through that thread (at least the first few pages) and then start to think what hardware you may need for your needs.

[LIGISTX]

Also, I will add, my i3 is enough to run freenas, a couple ubuntu server VM's, and I can transcode plex without issues. Granted, source and destination resolutions matter a lot, but I have had 0 issues, and I only give my plex VM 2 virtual cores out of my 4 possible (i3 is dual core + HT, ESXi shows all 4 as virtual CPU's to assign). I have hit freenas with writes from my NVME drive to saturate my gigabit LAN (freenas also gets 2 vcpu's), and watched a 1080p transcode to something lower than 1080 on both my PC and phone, and nothing slowed down at all. Granted, use case will vary, data streams will vary, and i don't have any game servers running, my VM's are mostly doing nothing at all. But, just figured I would share that data.

[wedgevic]

I would use a dell optiplex 390, those are ~50 bucks on eBay  and have 8GB RAM, I myself am thinking about that option for MY server

[AndreiArgeanu]

It depends on a lot of factors. First, what is the part of the system that is limting performance (CPU, GPU, RAM?) and how much money are you willing to spend on the sytem.

To be honest you could grab an older intel board paired with either one xeon with like 8 cores with 8 ram slots. Or grab a dual socket board and grab 2, 8 core xeons