nas newbie who wants a multi purpose server.

[sellXD]

Hi all!
Let me first off say that i have little to no experience with servers (hardware / software) but i do build and watercool my own PCs.

Since i have no idea where to start, i have a small list of things that it should be able to do listed from top to bottom with must haves and nice to haves.

 

---must haves---

>NAS
>being able to install and launch games on the NAS so the PCs in my home will not require any storage other than the bootdrive

>Plex server with remote access

>2.5gig networking

>power efficient (europes prices are hell atm)

---nice to haves---

>hosting a website 24/7

>hosting a e-mailserver

>hosting game servers for gmod/csgo/minecraft for up to 12 players

 

So i want to know if i can achieve these requirements, and if so what kind of hardware / software i would need, and how to set it up that way.

Informative videos on such topics would be amazing aswell, as i don't even know how to search for my edge case.

 

Thanks!

-sell

[Sjaakie]

Installing and running games from them will be quite storage intensive, especially speed would be an interesting factor. You'll want ssd's to run the games from and the 2.5 GB link would be a minimum requirement I would say, 10 G would be preferred but will come at a steeper price premium. Especially if you're running multiple users at once. Honestly it's not a regular thing to set up so you may run into issues but I'm sure it can be done.

 

The rest isn't very resource intensive so it can probably run off of any old desktop pc from the last 10 years. Maybe some used low power use xeon server / workstation? Add some ssd's and 1+ Gb ethernet cards and you should have a good starting point.

 

Dropping the game install on a nas requirement would be a way easier starting point though.

 

Running websites and email servers are very low power for home use. Anything serious should be run at a provider anyway.

[BiotechBen]

1 hour ago, sellXD said:

Hi all!
Let me first off say that i have little to no experience with servers (hardware / software) but i do build and watercool my own PCs.

Since i have no idea where to start, i have a small list of things that it should be able to do listed from top to bottom with must haves and nice to haves.

 

---must haves---

>NAS
>being able to install and launch games on the NAS so the PCs in my home will not require any storage other than the bootdrive

>Plex server with remote access

>2.5gig networking

>power efficient (europes prices are hell atm)

---nice to haves---

>hosting a website 24/7

>hosting a e-mailserver

>hosting game servers for gmod/csgo/minecraft for up to 12 players

 

So i want to know if i can achieve these requirements, and if so what kind of hardware / software i would need, and how to set it up that way.

Informative videos on such topics would be amazing aswell, as i don't even know how to search for my edge case.

 

Thanks!

-sell

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/cxsjhk

-lots of storage including cache drive for VMs, nvme for latency sensitive tasks

-Plenty of cores

-Fairly low power usage

-Good expandability

-Fairly budget oriented without skimping

 

[MG2R]

There's many things here that both very specific and yet very fuzzy.

 

Pretty much anything in this list is achievable reasonably easy except for

1. power efficient. Running your own server gets expensive fast. Even ignoring compute requirements, running 10 hard drives will net you at the very least 50W of continuous power. 50 W * 0.001 W/kW * 24 h/day * 365 days/year = 438 kWh/year. At current prices where I live that's about 300 euro per year. And again, that's not taking into account actual processing power, networking, etc... that's just hard drives.

2. Using the NAS as "local storage". While on the surface, it might seem easy to do... a 10 Gbps network connection will net you ~ 1GB/s throughput if the storage can handle it, that will not actually render you proper performance when actually used as hosting for program files for Windows. Windows network drives use the SMB protocol which will not be anywhere near performant enough for random IO. Using Multichannel SMB, maaaaybe. But I'd doubt it.

3. Hosting a mail server. Just don't. Speaking from experience here. I have run my own mail server for years and years before switching over to a hosted solution at protonmail. Even ignoring the fact that residential connections typically do not provide a static IP address, nor allow outgoing traffic on typical mail server ports to counter spammers, the process of setting up and maintaining your own mail server is pure masochism. Keeping your server out of spam lists, making sure big mail providers trust you, keeping everything secure,... really.... don't bother. Especially because mail is ever-increasingly the centerpoint of your online security. Unless you make it your actual profession, do not run the risk of having your online life hijacked by a script kiddy.

 

The other requirements... For plex a simple core-i3 will do fine as long as you expose the iGPU to Plex. Hosting websites is easy enough for pretty much any machine... if the traffic is low. hosting game servers should be similarly easy, provided the games you want to host support dedicated servers.

 

I'm a bit of a Linux nerd so I'd run my own soltion, but if you want an easy time look into something like truenas or freenas.

[MG2R]

Hardware-wise: you can often find good deals in old servers on ebay. Watch out for proprietary RAID cards though, they're a bit of a chore to get owrking right. I'd suggest flashing them to simple HBA mode or trying to find a system with an HBA in th efirst place.

 

Going that route does mean giving up on some power efficiency but if the upfront costs are low enough that might just be worth it.

 

I've been runing a Dell R510 for quite a while now. Old system but she runs plex, nextcloud, UT99 game server, and some other media organizing services just fine. For Plex, I'm limited to a single encoding stream though and I can't handle 4K blurays. Mostly because the CPU in my system does not have an iGPU with quicksync. That system with 8 drives runs at 90W continuous, to give you some idea. the 8 drives are a random assortment acquired throughout the years. Nice mix of WD Greens and Seagate ST1000s of varying sizes. Oldest drives have 60k+ power-on hours now. Running a ZFS pool of three vdevs: 1 vdev in raidz1 (RAID5), using 3x4 TB drives, one vdev in mirror with 2x 4TB drives, and one vdev in mirror with 2x2 TB drives. The final drive is a 4TB hot-spare.

 

The whole thing is backed up nightly using Borg Backups to an offsite system

[manikyath]

few things to note here:

- while some games are fine, some games *HATE* running off network storage. the NAS will never replace local storage if you arent going 10gig infiniband across the entire network.

- a webserver and a mail server by default are public services, so they dont belong in your home network if you plan to do anything more than some experimentation. rent a small VPS if you want to do this. hetzner's absolute bottom base level tier machines are plenty.

- game servers have the same rant as above. assuming "up to 12 people" are friends - all fine and good. but if you intend to have these open to the public: datacenter.

- dont bother watercooling your home server, not worth the reliability concern.

- redundant storage (RAID, ZFS, ..) is NOT a backup. if you want to make sure you dont lose data, think of a backup strategy. in my case i 'just' have a 10TB drive in a USB enclosure to make backups overnight.

 

now.. on topic:

 

you build desktops already. congrats, you now know how to build a server too. i've been running off of "my old gaming desktop minus the GPU as a server" for something like 10 years, and it's been great. wether you should go windows or linux depends on if all the game servers you want to run will run on linux (all your examples will.)

 

so, if you have anything currently on the shelf, that's now your new server. efficiency is all fine and good, but even with the current prices you wont see efficiency differences turn into a power bill difference that'll offset the cost of a new build.

 

if you dont have anything collecting dust, @BiotechBen has got a nice starting point for a new build. i wouldnt go watercooled route, but do with that what you wish.

[BiotechBen]

19 minutes ago, manikyath said:

if you dont have anything collecting dust, @BiotechBen has got a nice starting point for a new build. i wouldnt go watercooled route, but do with that what you wish.

Water cooling mostly for low profile and being able to have sufficient thermal soak for burst workloads.