Home Server Setup

[tbase9]

I am looking to set up a general purpose home server and I was wondering how to go about this and what hardware I would need. I tried looking up stuff regarding server setups, but could not find what I was looking for. 

 

As I said, I was looking to set up a general purpose home server. Some of the things I can think off hand that I would like to do are using it as a storage center for possibly media or files or backups, and using it to host a machine learning model such as for the spaghetti detective plugin for octoprint for 3d printing. I was planning on this mostly being accessed locally, but may want to enable myself to remotely access it.

 

Please let me know if what I am proposing does not align with how a server would operate. Also, I am not sure if this is the right location, so if not please let me know where I can post this.

 

Edit: I was basically looking for something that can suit my needs at the moment and then easily upgraded in the future. Whether that involves rack mounts or simply buying more pc parts for a "pc" server, I dont really care which.

[Windows7ge]

Are you looking to buy one or are you looking to build one?

 

There are NAS units from companies like QNAP but they're really use case specific. If you want to host virtual machines or need support for windows software that won't be an option.

[Lapsio]

What do you mean by server. I mean technically even Raspberry Pi can be a server if it operates 24/7 and hosts some services. Are you looking for actual rackmount, high power unit like Dell PowerEdge? Do you have 19" rack at home or any place where you could put such device? Please remember that actual rackmount servers are loud. And it's different level of "loud" than what average person is used to at home.

 

Or is something like passive cooled HTPC-like machine more aligned with your needs? If you look mostly for storage and other stuff is secondary task for this machine then you may be interested in getting some smaller, cheaper machine and attaching external SAS shelf to it. Actually you can attach SAS shelf to pretty much any machine as long as you buy PCI-E eSAS controller. Or like @Windows7ge mentioned - beefy x86 NAS. Some of them even allow putting discrete pci-e GPU in them and support KVM hypervisor.

 

Alternatively you can just build PC with lots of drives and call it a server... I use Fractal Define R5 chassis with 8x 2TB NAS HDDs for 14TB RAID array, Samsung 850 PRO, 32gb ram and i7 for KVM VMs. and well yeah I could say it's a "server". It's probably one of quietest and least intrusive solutions if you want to get machine running 24/7 at home since you can basically load it with dozen of Noctuas to get moderately comfortable sleep at night and call it a day.

[BrinkGG]

1 minute ago, tbase9 said:

I am looking to set up a general purpose home server and I was wondering how to go about this and what hardware I would need. I tried looking up stuff regarding server setups, but could not find what I was looking for. 

 

As I said, I was looking to set up a general purpose home server. Some of the things I can think off hand that I would like to do are using it as a storage center for possibly media or files or backups, and using it to host a machine learning model such as for the spaghetti detective plugin for octoprint for 3d printing. I was planning on this mostly being accessed locally, but may want to enable myself to remotely access it.

 

Please let me know if what I am proposing does not align with how a server would operate. Also, I am not sure if this is the right location, so if not please let me know where I can post this.

As for hardware, it completely depends on what you want to do with it and how fast you want it done. Do you want a tower server similar to a regular desktop PC? Do you want just a box with your hard drives in it and a little processing like a Synology NAS or similar? Or do you want a full blown rackmount server? 

 

So don't have a lot of experience with machine learning, but my guess is it's either something you run in a container on a VM host or just run in a VM of windows or linux. If that's the case, then you probably want to look into a VM host like Proxmox, ESXi, QEMU on Ubuntu, or something similar. If making a networked storage server is more the priority, Freenas or nas4Free could do the job. Freenas' Jail system can also do really well for containers and running services. (Plex, CCTV server, Pi Hole, etc.) 

[tbase9]

21 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Are you looking to buy one or are you looking to build one?

 

There are NAS units from companies like QNAP but they're really use case specific. If you want to host virtual machines or need support for windows software that won't be an option.

I was looking for something that would be able to host virtual machines if I wanted and possibly run windows software, such as blue iris.

[tbase9]

18 minutes ago, Lapsio said:

What do you mean by server. I mean technically even Raspberry Pi can be a server if it operates 24/7 and hosts some services. Are you looking for actual rackmount, high power unit like Dell PowerEdge? Do you have 19" rack at home or any place where you could put such device? Please remember that actual rackmount servers are loud. And it's different level of "loud" than what average person is used to at home.

 

Or is something like passive cooled HTPC-like machine more aligned with your needs? If you look mostly for storage and other stuff is secondary task for this machine then you may be interested in getting some smaller, cheaper machine and attaching external SAS shelf to it. Actually you can attach SAS shelf to pretty much any machine as long as you buy PCI-E eSAS controller. Or like @Windows7ge mentioned - beefy x86 NAS. Some of them even allow putting discrete pci-e GPU in them and support KVM hypervisor.

 

Alternatively you can just build PC with lots of drives and call it a server... I use Fractal Define R5 chassis with 8x 2TB NAS HDDs for 14TB RAID array, Samsung 850 PRO, 32gb ram and i7 for KVM VMs. and well yeah I could say it's a "server". It's probably one of quietest and least intrusive solutions if you want to get machine running 24/7 at home since you can basically load it with dozen of Noctuas to get moderately comfortable sleep at night and call it a day.

I added this section to the main post. I'm not sure if it really answers your questions well enough to respond.

 

"I was basically looking for something that can suit my needs at the moment and then easily upgraded in the future. Whether that involves rack mounts or simply buying more pc parts for a "pc" server, I dont really care which."

[tbase9]

18 minutes ago, BrinkGG said:

As for hardware, it completely depends on what you want to do with it and how fast you want it done. Do you want a tower server similar to a regular desktop PC? Do you want just a box with your hard drives in it and a little processing like a Synology NAS or similar? Or do you want a full blown rackmount server? 

 

So don't have a lot of experience with machine learning, but my guess is it's either something you run in a container on a VM host or just run in a VM of windows or linux. If that's the case, then you probably want to look into a VM host like Proxmox, ESXi, QEMU on Ubuntu, or something similar. If making a networked storage server is more the priority, Freenas or nas4Free could do the job. Freenas' Jail system can also do really well for containers and running services. (Plex, CCTV server, Pi Hole, etc.) 

I was looking to be able to store files, run VMS, host a blue iris server, and that machine learning model I mentioned also. I was planning on using some for of linux, but wasnt sure which flavor to use at the moment either. I wanted a unit with some beef so it can operate pretty fast whether it be file transfer or a computational heavy process.

Edited October 11, 2019 by tbase9

[Firewrath9]

7 minutes ago, tbase9 said:

I added this section to the main post. I'm not sure if it really answers your questions well enough to respond.

 

"I was basically looking for something that can suit my needs at the moment and then easily upgraded in the future. Whether that involves rack mounts or simply buying more pc parts for a "pc" server, I dont really care which."

I'd reccommend something like a used dell R720, for like 200-300$ you get a pair of sandy/ivy bridge 6c12t xeons and some drive bays and a couple PCIe slots.

https://www.labgopher.com/

Search for R720, or HP DL380p G8. Either get the cheapest ones then stick a bunch of 8GB DDR3 ECC dimms (like 10$ ea.) and a couple of decent CPUs like e5-2650 v2s (50$ ea. on ebay), or get one that already has a decent CPU in it. btw v2 cpu's might need a bios update, you can get something like a e5-2603 for like 3-5$ on ebay.

You can stick a gpu in there with like a special kit and a beefier PSU. (for cards > 75W) 

the 1100W PSU is like 100$, 750W is like 50$. You could stick something like 4 1050 Ti's with nothing but the stock 750W psu.

[Windows7ge]

5 minutes ago, tbase9 said:

I was looking for something that would be able to host virtual machines if I wanted and possibly run windows software, such as blue iris.

A hypervisor OS may be what you'd want then. You could then take all the system resources and allocate them to virtual machines or containers serving different functions. There's quite a few free options here. I like PROXMOX and QEMU+virt-manager on Debian Linux.

 

For hardware this still gives you the options of a pre-build or something you can build yourself. If you don't need anything super powerful a single socket 4C/8T Xeon and 16GB of RAM to start probably wouldn't be bad.

[tbase9]

46 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

A hypervisor OS may be what you'd want then. You could then take all the system resources and allocate them to virtual machines or containers serving different functions. There's quite a few free options here. I like PROXMOX and QEMU+virt-manager on Debian Linux.

 

For hardware this still gives you the options of a pre-build or something you can build yourself. If you don't need anything super powerful a single socket 4C/8T Xeon and 16GB of RAM to start probably wouldn't be bad.

So this set up would just run debian linux, or ubuntu as someone else suggested, and any application I wanted to virtualize, I would user QEMU or PROXMOX? Then any ftp or file storage would be run with a drive and set up on the linux distro itself? 

 

Also, if I did want to do a rack or prebuild, is there anything you can recommend?

[Windows7ge]

1 minute ago, tbase9 said:

So this set up would just run debian linux, or ubuntu as someone else suggested, and any application I wanted to virtualize, I would user QEMU or PROXMOX? Then any ftp or file storage would be run with a drive and set up on the linux distro itself? 

Got some words and terms twisted there.

 

Ubuntu = Debian GNU/Linux (your OS)

QEMU is the back-end (what you don't see) of a hypervisor that can run on Debian.

PROXMOX is a OS. It is a hypervisor in itself by hosting virtual machines (the purpose of the OS)

Never use FTP. What you want is SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol). FTP has no security.

 

With a hypervisor like PROXMOX you can install a container and install samba & ssh-server then create a mount point from your ZFS pool. This would enable you to access the files locally or remotely.