Server restructure feedback

DragonTamer1 · February 12, 2021

I've got a home server that acts as a storage server, between 5 and 7 game servers, PiHole (VM), Plex server, phone backup and folding server. It works pretty well for most of what it does but a couple of things are starting to creep in as problems.

1. Since the OS is windows and everything else runs inside that if windows crashes (has been known to happen even with the ECC) everything goes down including PiHole which can bring down my internet if the server does not recover. I have an old laptop I am trying to figure out how to act as a backup but that is a different project.

2. I have been getting errors with Plex transcoding for certain content. The only thing I can think of is that the Quadro p400 is having problems because it doesn't have Quadro drivers. The system uses Geforce drivers for the 1060s I use for folding which disable the quadro drivers.

My plan was to convert the whole system to run Proxmox and deploy VMs as necessary but I have concerns.

Proxmox can act as a nas if I understand correctly, does anyone have any experience with this or would it be better to run Truenas in a VM? Both use ZFS I think which brings me to my next problem.
The drives that I use the NAS I'm pretty sure are SMR drives which I didn't think about when I bought them (they were very cheap). ZFS doesn't like SMR for things like rebuilding an array, but are there any other problems outside of this issue?
If Proxmox can be used as a NAS, can it utilize cache drives for write operations?
As of right now, the server runs Syncthing to copy photos off of everyone's phone to a drive and then once a week it copies the files to the NAS drives for "archiving." Is there any way to do this in Proxmox or maybe something similar?

This is something I have planned for a ways off since I don't have any income right now and some additional parts would be required. I'm mostly just trying to wrap my head around some of the technical details of it.

Electronics Wizardy · February 12, 2021

6 minutes ago, DragonTamer1 said:

1. Since the OS is windows and everything else runs inside that if windows crashes (has been known to happen even with the ECC) everything goes down including PiHole which can bring down my internet if the server does not recover. I have an old laptop I am trying to figure out how to act as a backup but that is a different project.

How often does this happen? I have some hyper-v servers I use at work, and they have gone years without a crash, and run dns server with not unplanned outages.

If your seeing crashes somewhat often, its probalby a bad software setup or bad hardware, and switching to linux won't really reduce crashes.

7 minutes ago, DragonTamer1 said:

2. I have been getting errors with Plex transcoding for certain content. The only thing I can think of is that the Quadro p400 is having problems because it doesn't have Quadro drivers. The system uses Geforce drivers for the 1060s I use for folding which disable the quadro drivers.

Should work fine if you mix cards, Ive done it before.

7 minutes ago, DragonTamer1 said:

Proxmox can act as a nas if I understand correctly, does anyone have any experience with this or would it be better to run Truenas in a VM? Both use ZFS I think which brings me to my next problem.

Its just debian under the hood, so any debian guide works fine. I use my proxmox host as a nas without issues

7 minutes ago, DragonTamer1 said:

The drives that I use the NAS I'm pretty sure are SMR drives which I didn't think about when I bought them (they were very cheap). ZFS doesn't like SMR for things like rebuilding an array, but are there any other problems outside of this issue?

Its gonna be slow, but shouldn't have too many other issues. Go mdadm or snapraid or anoutehr storage system for performance and rebuild time

8 minutes ago, DragonTamer1 said:

If Proxmox can be used as a NAS, can it utilize cache drives for write operations?

Its using the linux disk stack, so you can use things like lvm caching, zfs l2arc, bcache and others.

9 minutes ago, DragonTamer1 said:

As of right now, the server runs Syncthing to copy photos off of everyone's phone to a drive and then once a week it copies the files to the NAS drives for "archiving." Is there any way to do this in Proxmox or maybe something similar?

Not sure if you can do it from the phone. I use rsync scripts to copy files without issues. I can use nextcloud to backup photos.

DragonTamer1 · February 14, 2021

On 2/12/2021 at 12:45 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

How often does this happen? I have some hyper-v servers I use at work, and they have gone years without a crash, and run dns server with not unplanned outages.

If your seeing crashes somewhat often, its probalby a bad software setup or bad hardware, and switching to linux won't really reduce crashes.

This happens seemingly at random. Earlier in 2020 it crashed 6 times in one month, then went several months without any issues. The last two blue screens happened in October and November about a month apart and then it went quiet. I think one of the game servers is causing it but I'm not too sure. I think in November we switched it to a stand alone and it might have solved the problem. Unfortunately this game server is not one that I can just throw into virtualbox like I'm doing now as it needs an actual GPU to run and I haven't found a way to pass through in virtualbox.

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Should work fine if you mix cards, Ive done it before.

I'll keep an eye on it but the crashes seem to be caused by graphics drivers. I don't know if the game I mentioned above is causing the problem. It is known to be a buggy game.

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Its gonna be slow, but shouldn't have too many other issues. Go mdadm or snapraid or anoutehr storage system for performance and rebuild time

Rebuild time is not really a concern, I was more concerned about if read times are affected. Write speeds could be offset with the cache SSD. My largest transfers are typically only 5GB or less.

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Not sure if you can do it from the phone. I use rsync scripts to copy files without issues. I can use nextcloud to backup photos.

Are you saying I use rsync to copy the files from the first drive to the second drive?

On 2/12/2021 at 2:50 AM, ThatOneDunce said:

Would Proxmox/some other type 1 hypervisor be a viable solution? That way, it'll take a hardware failure to take down everything at once (I think).

This was kind of my plan, try to isolate problem software into its own VM so that only one VM goes down instead of the whole machine. It's not really something I can do with the way the system is set up now.

Electronics Wizardy · February 14, 2021

3 hours ago, DragonTamer1 said:

This happens seemingly at random. Earlier in 2020 it crashed 6 times in one month, then went several months without any issues. The last two blue screens happened in October and November about a month apart and then it went quiet. I think one of the game servers is causing it but I'm not too sure. I think in November we switched it to a stand alone and it might have solved the problem. Unfortunately this game server is not one that I can just throw into virtualbox like I'm doing now as it needs an actual GPU to run and I haven't found a way to pass through in virtualbox.

this seems like a hardware issue.

3 hours ago, DragonTamer1 said:

This was kind of my plan, try to isolate problem software into its own VM so that only one VM goes down instead of the whole machine. It's not really something I can do with the way the system is set up now.

How is it seutp now? Just saying hyper-v on windows is also a type 1 hypervisor that can also do gpu passthough if you want. Id move everything to vms if you can.