What Server for Me

[The Torrent]

for a printer server which can be accessed from far + seeding + (maybe plex server? maybe ill just do encoding at the other end) + nas for home and maybe other side of the country use and storage about 10tb.

 

At the moment i can get a dl360p g8 for £160 with 2x 2667 and 32gb of ram, however homelab studio keep recommending me raspberry pi's which i feel like will be more complicated to set up so would like to avoid and go for all in one box simplicity.

 

I need help with other recommendations of hardware server, as well as software? Homelab HATE unraid, so i am currently thinking i might go freenas or something althought i dont understand too much of the issue with unraid considering you can have more than 1 parity disk now.

 

Budget is up to lets say 300, i would like to spend less than 200, but i would happily spend 100 on a dl380 g8 2620 someone is offering me if you think thats a good choice. Thats excluding drives, so i need help with drives too - i have loads of sata 2.5inch drives lying around idk if i can put them to use but dont mind buying 3.5inch drives if thats what the server requires. Apparently HP is picky on drives if they aren't HP branded? Can anyone confirm?

 

Thanks

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id go proxmox on the hardware. Flexable storage, including optional ZFS. Good vm + container support.

 

2 hours ago, The Torrent said:

Apparently HP is picky on drives if they aren't HP branded?

Non hp drives will normally work, but some servers will run fans at max speed if there not hp

 

2 hours ago, The Torrent said:

At the moment i can get a dl360p g8 for £160 with 2x 2667 and 32gb of ram

Thats a pretty good deal. Id probably try to get a v2 chip if you can as there more power efficent and faster.

[The Torrent]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id go proxmox on the hardware. Flexable storage, including optional ZFS. Good vm + container support.

 

Non hp drives will normally work, but some servers will run fans at max speed if there not hp

 

Thats a pretty good deal. Id probably try to get a v2 chip if you can as there more power efficent and faster.

These are only v1 chips so ill miss out on this deal if i try search for v2.

Do you know specifically which servers will max speed fans? I really dont want that.

Others recommended me freenas for my basic needs - is there anything specifically you think proxmox does better than freenas?

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 hours ago, The Torrent said:

These are only v1 chips so ill miss out on this deal if i try search for v2.

Do you know specifically which servers will max speed fans? I really dont want that.

Others recommended me freenas for my basic needs - is there anything specifically you think proxmox does better than freenas?

What don't you like about unraid? Its great for mixing different sized drives.

 

Those servers are pretty loud and power hungry, so id probably just try to get a low end desktop here instead, they will also be cheaper with the power savings.

[The Torrent]

7 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What don't you like about unraid? Its great for mixing different sized drives.

 

Those servers are pretty loud and power hungry, so id probably just try to get a low end desktop here instead, they will also be cheaper with the power savings.

I'm fine with unraid, homelab discord server is 100% not.

https://h.en0.io/raw/xtreks-unraid-rant

heres a rant the bot on homelab discord summons up at will.

 

Power hungry? Hmmm i could just switch it off at night.. What about a dell r420 or r720? i can get some of those at a decent price and could even try and buy a v2 chip seperately and stick it in (i can get 2 2650v2 for 57 quid).

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 hours ago, The Torrent said:

I'm fine with unraid, homelab discord server is 100% not.

https://h.en0.io/raw/xtreks-unraid-rant

heres a rant the bot on homelab discord summons up at will.

THats one dude on line, I woudln't listen to them, its the best solution for mixed drives. Yea its noot a good enterprise storage solution, but was never made to be

 

6 hours ago, The Torrent said:

Power hungry? Hmmm i could just switch it off at night.. What about a dell r420 or r720? i can get some of those at a decent price and could even try and buy a v2 chip seperately and stick it in (i can get 2 2650v2 for 57 quid).

Id probably get a used desktop here, as they will use like 1/4 of the power, and are much quieter, you won't need the compute power.

 

What drives do you have? If you have a lot of small laptop drives, id just get a single big drive instead.

[The Torrent]

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

THats one dude on line, I woudln't listen to them, its the best solution for mixed drives. Yea its noot a good enterprise storage solution, but was never made to be

 

Id probably get a used desktop here, as they will use like 1/4 of the power, and are much quieter, you won't need the compute power.

 

What drives do you have? If you have a lot of small laptop drives, id just get a single big drive instead.

im acc p close to picking up a r720 with 8 1tb SAS drives.

I feel like i might just decide to dump my many small drives.

damn you make sense here and i go into homelab server and they also make sense lol

[Nick7]

That server is waaaay overkill and power hungry for what you need.

Just get some atom based board with enough SATA ports, or some el cheapo desktop for NAS.

No need to get 'real' server. You are overthinking too much.

[MattJenko]

For a file server and print server, this is way overkill. I have a Dell R720, which is the same generation, I use it to run many, many VM's. I also have an HP 8300 SFF that I've used as a basic fileserver for years. The used corp desktop will suit you better, depending on number of disks required. I can get 3x3.5 + an SSD into the SFF.

 

If you'd like hotswap bays so someone remotely can replace disks if required, try the tower versions, or workstation versions. Dell T420/620 or HP ML350/e. They have roughly the capability, but are configured to sit by themselves in offices rather than stacked floor to ceiling in soundproofed datacentres. It's not just noise, those fans can consume a fair amount of power by themselves.

 

As for software, for storage generally it comes down to Unraid, TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault. TrueNAS is fairly heavily built around ZFS, so unless you want to run that the others may be a better option. OMV is more flexible with filesystems give that it's Linux rather than FreeBSD based. Both will do the job you're after easily, and both can be virtualised on top of something like Proxmox (I have TrueNAS running in a VM on my R720 with the drives passed through). All of them provide some level of virtualisation support, which may or may not meet your needs. I know with Proxmox at least, it can use preconfigured turnkey lxc containers, took me about 20 mins to get GitLab and Jenkins build loops running, and very light on resources.

[Maticks]

On 2/3/2021 at 9:40 PM, The Torrent said:

I'm fine with unraid, homelab discord server is 100% not.

https://h.en0.io/raw/xtreks-unraid-rant

heres a rant the bot on homelab discord summons up at will.

 

Power hungry? Hmmm i could just switch it off at night.. What about a dell r420 or r720? i can get some of those at a decent price and could even try and buy a v2 chip seperately and stick it in (i can get 2 2650v2 for 57 quid).

That's what you were talking about by homelab discord. that is some serious hate.

 

It is not an enterprise solution for disks it is not a raid solution where performance is stacking based on the size of your array.

Unraid is always limited to a single disk performance because you read and write to your data drive and you make a copy of that on your parity drives (simple description).

Folders of data can be scaled across drives but they are individual disks of XFS Filesystem data.

 

The comment around Dockers crashing and VM's crashing, there was a bug once in 2018 where a release of unraid had dockers and vm's hanging it was patched and fixed in 24 hours. It was actually caused by the slackware linux kernel when they upgraded a full release in kernel revision.

Since then Unraid now has Stable and Next in the update system. Next is used for testing unraid releases and once they go RC they will push it to Stable. Then everyone gets it mostly bug free. I only run Stable.

 

The other thing that cause VM's to hang and Dockers to crash is when the filesystem is full, this is a unix thing not an unraid thing, not a linux thing. Even Mac's that are unix based if you fill up your hard drive you have a hell of a time trying to boot it to clear the drive.

The default folder for Dockers is the Cache pool, its the answer to high performance that the array doesn't have of spinning drives. if you need fast VM's and Docker Apps you'd run them in the Cache Pool. Most people only throw in 256GB SSD's that doesn't take much to fill.

 

two parity drives isn't a new thing for unraid? it's been in unraid since 2014, the overhead is minimal to the processor its about 150Mhz when your doing a rebuild.

the CPU overhead for ZFS is all the time and its on par with the unraid overhead but only when its rebuilding. normal operation its hardly noticeable.

 

The VM implementation on Unraid isn't the best its not like ESXi i would say its more than enough if you want to pass through hardware etc.

If you wanted advanced functions like snapshot mirroring it's not there.

That is the only thing in this whole post of his in discord that i kind of agree with the webui for VM's is garbage.

 

The Docker implementation is really good and the app community has a lot of content in it.

I've tried a few Docker managers in linux and other solutions Unraid's is simple and easy to update and roll back on. the Webui is very easy to use for their docker system.

 

The point of unraid is you take your old gaming system and make it your NAS, you throw different size drives in it and some redundancy, but you don't have speed.

If you are doing plex streaming and running vm's for home testing for gather of knowledge its perfect, if you want to take those disks out shove them into another computer unplug the usb drive with the boot data on it throw it into another system it will just work.

 

If you are running a business and your video editing premier off a shared drive it's just not going to have the performance.

 

I am no newbie, i've been a system admin for 3 ISP's for 12 years and a network engineer now days.

I could argue whats better than unraid there is so much that is but there is flexiablity with unraid you don't get from other solutions.

The guy who wrote that piece on discord has no idea what he is talking about, there is pieces of information in there that have some truth the rest of it is baseless rubbish.

 

I do have a Dell R720 Server and because its a server i run Raid6 on it using the hardware raid controller in it and have esxi installed.

I do have Unraid running as a VM on top of esxi because Dockers i find are easier to run in unraid.

Dell make their own version of Esxi for free which includes the drivers for the os, so the fans screaming isn't an issue.

HP i know you need to install drivers in windows to get the fans to go quiet, HP might have esxi also.

 

I think really at the end of the day you can try a few solutions and see what works for you.

If say i really didn't like Apple and i started writing rants of part truths its no different to this.

 

As a comparison i could say Console gaming isn't real gaming 40FPS is rubbish, PC's are the only true gaming systems at 100+FPS. 40FPS is not playable it's garbage. its shit.

But Consoles still have 500 Million people who think they are fine and for them 40FPS is plenty fast enough.