Want to build a server to host files and game servers

[lololrofl]

Hey everyone, first time lurker/first time poster, I need a little help understanding my options for building a server to host files and occasionally host servers for games (10+ year old games) or play older emulated games. I want to be able to access the hosted files from outside the local network and I also want the game servers to be accessible so that a friend outside the local network can play with us. I was looking at unRAID, but from the little bit of research I've done, it seems like unRAID is supposed to boot off a USB drive, bypassing Windows entirely, which won't entirely work for my scenario. I like the idea of being able to add drives without having to re-build the entire configuration, as my current storage configuration is going to be changed for sure. As of right now, I have a 10TB HDD and I plan to add a second for parity, a 256GB SSD that I was going to use to boot Windows from, and 512GB SSD as a cache, but that was assuming I was going to be using unRAID, and then I found out you boot into unRAID before Windows, throwing a wrench into that idea.

 

I have 85% of a computer ready (i5-4670k[looking for an 4770k/4790k ideally], 32GB RAM) but I just need a power supply and a case. I think that's plenty good enough for my use but I'm open to suggestions. Guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Master Disaster]

Could you be a bit more specific about what you want to run on it. Which game servers? Any other services? Is Windows a hard requirement?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id run a hpervisor on the hardware, then run windows or linux vms. unraid will work fine for this use.

 

 

[lololrofl]

 

4 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Could you be a bit more specific about what you want to run on it. Which game servers? Any other services? Is Windows a hard requirement?

Games: CS: Source/1.6, NoX, BlackOps3 is probably the most recent game we'd want a dedicated server for, but realistically it'll be games released before 2012. We'd also want to emulate console games to do races amongst my friends, but those games would be N64/PS1 era and earlier

Services: I half-joked about having a mail server as well but I doubt that will actually be a thing. Maybe a plex server, but what we know for sure right now is file server and game server. The ability to stream our game races on Discord or something would be a neat idea as well

Windows?: None of us have much experience with Linux, and Windows will for sure give us the compatibility to host any game server we want. It's not totally a hard requirement as long as the substitute will be compatible with the things we want to do.

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, lololrofl said:

 

Games: CS: Source/1.6, NoX, BlackOps3 is probably the most recent game we'd want a dedicated server for, but realistically it'll be games released before 2012. We'd also want to emulate console games to do races amongst my friends, but those games would be N64/PS1 era and earlier

Services: I half-joked about having a mail server as well but I doubt that will actually be a thing. Maybe a plex server, but what we know for sure right now is file server and game server. The ability to stream our game races on Discord or something would be a neat idea as well

Windows?: None of us have much experience with Linux, and Windows will for sure give us the compatibility to host any game server we want. It's not totally a hard requirement as long as the substitute will be compatible with the things we want to do.

Id really run a hypervisor on the hardware. Put everything in its own vm. Makes backup much easier, and you can't break other services with one of them. And you can run both windows and linux on the hardware.

[lololrofl]

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id really run a hypervisor on the hardware. Put everything in its own vm. Makes backup much easier, and you can't break other services with one of them. And you can run both windows and linux on the hardware.

Okay cool, I'll look into that. Do you have any decent reading materials to learn about how to set up Hyper-V? Especially with an unRAID set up

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, lololrofl said:

Okay cool, I'll look into that. Do you have any decent reading materials to learn about how to set up Hyper-V?

Id look at other hypervisors too. Unraid does storage pretty well for a home server here. Id probably use it here. Or something like proxmox works well too.

 

I guess you can use hyper-v, just not as big of a fan of it here.

[lololrofl]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id look at other hypervisors too. Unraid does storage pretty well for a home server here. Id probably use it here. Or something like proxmox works well too.

 

I guess you can use hyper-v, just not as big of a fan of it here.

Excuse my ignorance, I thought Hyper-V was just a short form for hypervisor, I didn't realize there are other types.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, lololrofl said:

Excuse my ignorance, I thought Hyper-V was just a short form for hypervisor, I didn't realize there are other types.

hyper-v is the hypervisor from microsoft, there are many others out there. Unraid has a hypervisor in it too using Linux KVM

[Master Disaster]

3 minutes ago, lololrofl said:

Excuse my ignorance, I thought Hyper-V was just a short form for hypervisor, I didn't realize there are other types.

Nah, Hyper-V is a type 2 hypervisor, as in it runs on top of another OS (in this case Windows), HV, VMWare/Player & Virtual Box are all examples of type 2. You really want a type 1 that runs on the bare metal. Proxmox & ESXi are type 1. The beauty of Proxmox is you get a type 1 hypervisor running inside an almost complete Linux install so you get the best of both worlds.

 

If you really want to go deep down the rabbit hole after taking both the red & plue pills then IMO the ultimate homelab setup is Proxmox running Webmin. These 2 things combined (and a fair few hours of reading) will give you to option to run and manage pretty much anything.

[lololrofl]

Just so I'm following along correctly, I can use Proxmox to run a VM instance of Windows to host game servers, use emulators, run Plex etc., while simultaneously running a VM for unRAID to host my files?

[Master Disaster]

28 minutes ago, lololrofl said:

Just so I'm following along correctly, I can use Proxmox to run a VM instance of Windows to host game servers, use emulators, run Plex etc., while simultaneously running a VM for unRAID to host my files?

Correct.

 

Here's a great setup guide to get you started...

 

[lololrofl]

8 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Correct.

 

Here's a great setup guide to get you started...

 

Great, thanks for this! This video isn't for Proxmox, but can I assume Proxmox setup would be similar enough?

[Electronics Wizardy]

35 minutes ago, lololrofl said:

Just so I'm following along correctly, I can use Proxmox to run a VM instance of Windows to host game servers, use emulators, run Plex etc., while simultaneously running a VM for unRAID to host my files?

Id just run unRaid on the hardware, and then run your vms on unraid. No need to use proxmox for your use case here.

 

 

 

49 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Nah, Hyper-V is a type 2 hypervisor, as in it runs on top of another OS (in this case Windows), HV, VMWare/Player & Virtual Box are all examples of type 2. You really want a type 1 that runs on the bare metal. Proxmox & ESXi are type 1. The beauty of Proxmox is you get a type 1 hypervisor running inside an almost complete Linux install so you get the best of both worlds.

hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor. It doesn't run ontop of windows, its makes its own partitions like how linux kvm/ esxi does. 

 

 

[Master Disaster]

20 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor. It doesn't run ontop of windows, its makes its own partitions like how linux kvm/ esxi does.

Interesting. I just realised I've never actually used it but I always thought you installed it on top of Windows through Add/Remove Features.

[Master Disaster]

25 minutes ago, lololrofl said:

Great, thanks for this! This video isn't for Proxmox, but can I assume Proxmox setup would be similar enough?

I linked to the wrong video, sorry. Have fixed it now though you might want to watch both as the Proxmox setup is kind of a part 2 to the Ubuntu server one.

[lololrofl]

Thanks for the information everyone, I'm going to look more into unRAID virtualization since it sounds like I can run a Windows instance off that. I'll update this thread if I have anymore questions.

[lololrofl]

Back again, how can I set up unRAID so that my friend can access and upload files remotely, and maybe have his own folder no one else can access?

[thesneakypet]

On 3/30/2021 at 2:09 AM, lololrofl said:

Back again, how can I set up unRAID so that my friend can access and upload files remotely, and maybe have his own folder no one else can access?

To confirm this is on your NAS?

 

If so you'll need to do this and set up a folder which you should be able to remove some members access to: https://turbofuture.com/computers/How-to-Remotely-connect-to-your-NAS-device