Picking a home server OS

[XeanWolf20]

Hi guys, so I got a home server and I want to know what’s best for my use case.

 

So I have around 32 cores and 64gb ram and 8 TB ( for now ) and I want to have vms, NAS and game servers ( Minecraft modded ).

 

Is it just best if I just went for trueNAS scale for everything. Or promox for my VMs and TrueNAS as a VM for my NAS. 
 

my vms are not going to be big it’s just Kasm workspaces, maybe a little Ubuntu LTS, nothing will be using a lot of ram or anything. The thing that will use the most is probably my Minecraft modded server. 
 

so I’m torn between proxmox with a TrueNAS vm, or TrueNAS.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Kilrah]

I've settled on Unraid personally for the flexibility, and I prefer running things as Dockers, more lightweight. 

[XeanWolf20]

4 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

I've settled on Unraid personally for the flexibility, and I prefer running things as Dockers, more lightweight. 

Am I correct in thinking only TrueNAS can run things in docker not Proxmox?

[ToboRobot]

3 minutes ago, XeanWolf20 said:

Am I correct in thinking only TrueNAS can run things in docker not Proxmox?

You can run docker via Proxmox Qemu VM

[m9x3mos]

1 hour ago, XeanWolf20 said:

Hi guys, so I got a home server and I want to know what’s best for my use case.

 

So I have around 32 cores and 64gb ram and 8 TB ( for now ) and I want to have vms, NAS and game servers ( Minecraft modded ).

 

Is it just best if I just went for trueNAS scale for everything. Or promox for my VMs and TrueNAS as a VM for my NAS. 
 

my vms are not going to be big it’s just Kasm workspaces, maybe a little Ubuntu LTS, nothing will be using a lot of ram or anything. The thing that will use the most is probably my Minecraft modded server. 
 

so I’m torn between proxmox with a TrueNAS vm, or TrueNAS.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Promox is a better hyper visor then truenas is. Scale is better than core but still has some deficiencies.

 

[voyager_]

Second for Unraid here! I tried a couple of options and settled on unraid for two home servers. My primary machine handles my main storage, plex (gpu transcoding is awesome), 2 minecraft servers, home assistant running in a vm, Windows vm, VPN, etc. My second hold a backup of the primary as well as a windows VM running Blue Iris for my cameras and deepstack for AI object recognition. With VM's the hardware passthrough works really well, gpu transcoding with plex is simple to get going, docker and plug in support is great (check out community applications).

 

The biggest reason I went unraid was for the ease of expansion down the road and for the way it stores files. Files are not stripped across disks but rather are stored on a single disk. I had an HBA card die and was able to just plug the disks into a seperate linux machine and pull the data. This storage method has a flaw though, write speeds even with a good cpu and disks tends to sit around 50MB/s while read speeds are limited by a single disk. If you set up a cache the write speed to the server is limited by your cache drives and will be moved to the array at a later time. I put two cache drives mirrored incase of a SSD failed before the move operation could take place.

 

You can also set your vms, dockers, etc to only use the cache drives. I found this had a huge impact on performance since it wasn't trying to write to the array and read from a mechanical disk. Plex databases and metadata is also stored here improving loading speeds. With plex I do have it set to use ram for transcoding to save some wear and tear on the disks.

 

You can also set it up with a couple different operating systems and see which you prefer.

 

If you do go unraid check out byte my bits & space invader on youtube! They have great tips and tricks for configuring the machine and getting the most from it.

[m9x3mos]

3 hours ago, voyager_ said:

Second for Unraid here! I tried a couple of options and settled on unraid for two home servers. My primary machine handles my main storage, plex (gpu transcoding is awesome), 2 minecraft servers, home assistant running in a vm, Windows vm, VPN, etc. My second hold a backup of the primary as well as a windows VM running Blue Iris for my cameras and deepstack for AI object recognition. With VM's the hardware passthrough works really well, gpu transcoding with plex is simple to get going, docker and plug in support is great (check out community applications).

 

The biggest reason I went unraid was for the ease of expansion down the road and for the way it stores files. Files are not stripped across disks but rather are stored on a single disk. I had an HBA card die and was able to just plug the disks into a seperate linux machine and pull the data. This storage method has a flaw though, write speeds even with a good cpu and disks tends to sit around 50MB/s while read speeds are limited by a single disk. If you set up a cache the write speed to the server is limited by your cache drives and will be moved to the array at a later time. I put two cache drives mirrored incase of a SSD failed before the move operation could take place.

 

You can also set your vms, dockers, etc to only use the cache drives. I found this had a huge impact on performance since it wasn't trying to write to the array and read from a mechanical disk. Plex databases and metadata is also stored here improving loading speeds. With plex I do have it set to use ram for transcoding to save some wear and tear on the disks.

 

You can also set it up with a couple different operating systems and see which you prefer.

 

If you do go unraid check out byte my bits & space invader on youtube! They have great tips and tricks for configuring the machine and getting the most from it.

The read and write speeds is the main limitation of unRAID yeah. For vms, if you are careful they the storage falls on a different disk for each vm access times aren't bad. If it is setup as cascade and multiple vms are on the same disk it will be pretty slow. With any of them, you really need to understand how the disks work. You can also replace hba cards without data loss in truenas as well. That's really only a concern with hardware raid configurations. 

Truenas also does pcie passthrough. Works great for things like blue iris.

The biggest benefit with unRAID it's that expanding is very easy. Just use your largest disk as the parity drive and you can add disks randomly to expand. For other software raid like truenas, you really need to plan it out. But access times are faster. With my 6 disks I can do over 900mbps.

[LIGISTX]

5 hours ago, XeanWolf20 said:

Hi guys, so I got a home server and I want to know what’s best for my use case.

 

So I have around 32 cores and 64gb ram and 8 TB ( for now ) and I want to have vms, NAS and game servers ( Minecraft modded ).

 

Is it just best if I just went for trueNAS scale for everything. Or promox for my VMs and TrueNAS as a VM for my NAS. 
 

my vms are not going to be big it’s just Kasm workspaces, maybe a little Ubuntu LTS, nothing will be using a lot of ram or anything. The thing that will use the most is probably my Minecraft modded server. 
 

so I’m torn between proxmox with a TrueNAS vm, or TrueNAS.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If you want to run VM’s, a true hypervisor will be best. If you just need docker containers, unraid may be your best bet (and it has pretty solid hypervisor functionality for VM’s). The part of your post that makes me say stay clear of truenas is “8TB for now”… ZFS is not easily upgraded down the line; each vdev needs its own redundancy, and you can’t add discs to already existing vdevs. Unraid makes it much easier for add storage later since it literally is not RAID.

 

For VM’s and containers, regardless of where option you pick, use an SSD. Store data on your SMB/NFS shares from whatever your storage server is (truenas or unraid), but run the actual operating systems and software off of SSD’s. 

[Kilrah]

4 hours ago, voyager_ said:

This storage method has a flaw though, write speeds even with a good cpu and disks tends to sit around 50MB/s 

If you enable reconstruct writes it will write at the speed of your slowest disk, should be 2-3 times that. It's not on by default since it requires all drives to be spinning and unraid tends to emphasize spinning disks down to save power etc, but if you're comparing to a ZFS-based system the disks would all be running there anyway so...

[danielsteiner]

For quite a long time, I have been simply running Ubuntu Server 18.04 as my server os (back when i used an old laptop as sever), when I switched to an old desktop PC, I initially updated to Ubuntu Server 20.04 and shortly after I redid the whole thing and I am now running TrueNAS Scale as OS for the simplicity and management UI. It comes with kubernetes and the option to run VMs, which is perfect for my use case (pfsense in a VM with two dedicated NICs for the router and all other workload on kubernetes / docker containers).