Looking to set up a home server

[CPT_BEEMO]

Hey everyone!

 

I have a bunch of movies on a hard drive, and recently came across a used tower that I could put to work. Just has to be able to do two things:

- Store media like music, movies and photos that can be accessed from any device in the house (more specifically, our chromecast)

- Run our minecraft server at all times

 

Im not new to building PC's by any stretch, but am very new to making a server or any of the programs that come with it.

 

Any help would be much appreciated.

[ryd994]

This post should be moved to NAS & server

 

There are many options:

- virtualization. Proxmox, esxi, etc.

  Advantage: each application can run on different OS. Say you like Truenas (frebsd) for storage and Linux for Minecraft. 

  Disadvantage: you will need a lot of RAM. You will need sriov capable hardware for the best performance. Take a io performance hit otherwise. Truenas officially against virtualization, unless you have a hba via pcie passthrough.

This is all enterprise/homelab stuff. Not expensive, but you need to learn a lot of things. (Not bad to learn some job skills)

 

- Truenas + bhyve virtualizated Linux Minecraft server

  Advantage: Truenas is running on bare metal, so it should be very happy. Good performance for the storage part.

  Disadvantage: you need to setup and maintain that Linux VM. Take some trials and errors. And Minecraft will likely will take a performance hit.

 

- Truenas + freebsd native Minecraft server:

  Advantage: good performance.

  Disadvantage: need some freebsd knowledge to properly setup the Minecraft as service. 

  That's only if there is good Minecraft server can run on freebsd. Is there any? I don't know.

  Maybe: there might be working bsd jail templates. Bsd jail is just like docker for Linux. If you have a good template, it will be easy to setup. 

 

- Truenas scale (Linux) + docker Minecraft.

  Advantage: good performance and easy management. I know there are many Minecraft docker templates, some must be good.

  Disadvantage: not much. Truenas scale is still in beta. There are some weird UI bugs. The storage service should be stable enough. 

 

- Debian/rhel or whatever your favorite Linux distro. + Zfs on Linux

  Advantage: good performance. Should be very stable if you use Debian or rhel.

  Disadvantage: a lot of configuration. You need to be a Linux expert. Configuring samba is web GUI on Truenas, but on Linux you need to do it yourself. There are guides online about how to setup samba with raid and Minecraft server, but good luck.

  If you're not savvy in Linux, worst case you may screw up your data, which is bad if the data is important. 

Zfs config is also web GUI on Truenas, which is more intuitive.

 

- windows everything

  Um... If you can afford a windows server license, at least a windows pro license. Then Windows isn't bad at all. And it's GUI, so relatively easy to setup.

You need a Minecraft server that runs well on windows too, which I'm not familiar with.

 

 

 

[ryd994]

BTW, what will you use the storage service for?

Just media? Then it doesn't need any data protection. Movie gone is gone, fine.

Or you want to time machine/backup anything? Then you not only should use ZFS, but also need an off-site backup, such as some cloud drive or Amazon S3.

 

----

 

Also, have you considered hardware specs? 

Storage server don't typically need much CPU. But can always benefit from more RAM. If you want your data safe, ECC RAM is a must.

 

Minecraft server likes single thread CPU performance. I've heard news about multi thread Minecraft servers, but have no idea how well do they work.

[Mihle]

It's possible to have Minecraft server as a docker on Unraid too.