Minecraft/NAS/Virtulation/Torrent

[Grifulkin]

So, I've been watching LTT for a few years now.  I have a server question, this place seems to be the best place to ask.

 

I want to get a server, I'm looking at a Dell R710.  My goals for this server are to run a NAS, a personal (modded) minecraft server, and maybe if I have room run a virtualization server (I've always wanted to), and a torrent server.  I was just wondering if a R710 with two E5507 CPUS and 48 GB of DDR3, would be good.  I may add some big HDD's for storage, and maybe an SSD or two for some fast storage for Minecraft and Torrents.  Would this be good, is it overkill, is it not enough?  Server hardware is just out of my realm of knowledge at the moment.  I appreciate any advice I can get, thank you.

[Electronics Wizardy]

That system looks good.

 

id  probaby install xen server,esxi,or a linux distro on a usb on there, then rn everything in a vm..

 

Hardware should be more than enough, Your mainy ram limited.

[bgibbz]

Yep that should be good. What OS are you planning on running? I would suggest running freeNAS. Its (obviously) free, very powerful, and should be able to do everything you need it to do. How much storage are you planning on using? If you use freeNAS, generally you want 8gb + (TB of storage) of RAM, so that should be more than enough ram.

[Grifulkin]

2 minutes ago, bgibbz said:

Yep that should be good. What OS are you planning on running? I would suggest running freeNAS. Its (obviously) free, very powerful, and should be able to do everything you need it to do. How much storage are you planning on using? If you use freeNAS, generally you want 8gb + (TB of storage) of RAM, so that should be more than enough ram.

So I was thinking of running FreeNAS, I've had a smaller server running for a while and I was just running Fedora Server with Samba to share with the Windows Machines.  I've been wanting to tinker with FreeNAS though, so this might be a good time to start.

[Grifulkin]

7 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

That system looks good.

 

id  probaby install xen server,esxi,or a linux distro on a usb on there, then rn everything in a vm..

 

Hardware should be more than enough, Your mainy ram limited.

So I'm intrigued, what would be the benefits of running everything on a VM?

[bgibbz]

1 minute ago, Grifulkin said:

So I was thinking of running FreeNAS, I've had a smaller server running for a while and I was just running Fedora Server with Samba to share with the Windows Machines.  I've been wanting to tinker with FreeNAS though, so this might be a good time to start.

Yep, I just started playing around with it on a spare system. Its nice because it has enterprise grade features (like ZFS) and is free. I also just googled out of interest, minecraft can be installed on it -

 

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-install-minecraft-server-in-a-jail.18246/

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Grifulkin said:

So I'm intrigued, what would be the benefits of running everything on a VM?

Security, reliablty

 

basically you can fuck up what ever you want in your minecraft server, and your fileserver is fine.

[Grifulkin]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Security, reliablty

 

basically you can fuck up what ever you want in your minecraft server, and your fileserver is fine.

That seems like a very good reason.  I like that idea.  I did just read about FreeNAS and jails, so I have options.

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, bgibbz said:

Yep that should be good. What OS are you planning on running? I would suggest running freeNAS. Its (obviously) free, very powerful, and should be able to do everything you need it to do. How much storage are you planning on using? If you use freeNAS, generally you want 8gb + (TB of storage) of RAM, so that should be more than enough ram.

Just as an FYI, the RAM rule of thumb in FreeNAS (ZFS specifically) is 8GB minimum, otherwise 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage. You can go lower than 8GB if you're running a very small pool, but if you have a 12TB pool, you don't need 20GB of RAM - 12GB should suffice. With that in mind, the system the OP is looking at has 48GB, which is plenty.

1 hour ago, Grifulkin said:

So I was thinking of running FreeNAS, I've had a smaller server running for a while and I was just running Fedora Server with Samba to share with the Windows Machines.  I've been wanting to tinker with FreeNAS though, so this might be a good time to start.

I just setup a FreeNAS server over the last week. It certainly has it's benefits and cons. I'm running 6x 3TB HDD's in a RAIDZ1 array (Equivalent to a RAID5 array) - 18TB raw, 15TB usable, 12.5TiB formatted.

 

I've got two Jails running:

Plex and Transmission

 

The only thing FreeNAS doesn't seem to do well is acting as a VM host. You can install VirtualBox on it, but apparently without hardware virtualization support.

 

The FreeNAS 10 Beta has a Linux based virtualization mechanism running, which is supposedly set to launch in the next Stable release.

 

The only big downside I've seen so far with my setup is moving files within the Pool. If I copy files on the network share to another location on the network share, I'm limited in copy speeds to the connection of the device I'm running. I'm on WIFI 2 floors above my server, so the speeds are a bit slow. I've actually resorted to SSH-ing into the FreeNAS server so I can run the copy command "locally", which is obviously way faster.

 

Not sure exactly why that seems to be the case, but since FreeNAS doesn't have a GUI file explorer, it's kind of annoying. This may not affect other people though, or even be a problem even if it does. It could be related to my setup in some way.

[kevinb2001]

you'd be better off running freenas in a vm off of esxi, using pcie passthrough of an hba, than you would be to try and run virtualbox in freenas 9.x as a vm host.

 

Not sure if the one you're looking at comes with all 4gb dimms but usually the ones with e5507's do. Maybe look for an R710 that doesn't come with cpu or ram, and then buy 8gb 10600r dimms seperately and upgrade to x5670's.

 

Also maybe post the description or link to whatever you're looking at buying.

[Grifulkin]

4 hours ago, kevinb2001 said:

you'd be better off running freenas in a vm off of esxi, using pcie passthrough of an hba, than you would be to try and run virtualbox in freenas 9.x as a vm host.

 

Not sure if the one you're looking at comes with all 4gb dimms but usually the ones with e5507's do. Maybe look for an R710 that doesn't come with cpu or ram, and then buy 8gb 10600r dimms seperately and upgrade to x5670's.

 

Also maybe post the description or link to whatever you're looking at buying.

The one I'm looking at is this server.  I've been checking out FreeNAS 10, they use bhyve as a hypervisor.  It seems very nice.  I could run FreeNAS and then set up a Linux VM and run minecraft off of that so as to not disrupt the rest of the system.

[dalekphalm]

23 minutes ago, Grifulkin said:

The one I'm looking at is this server.  I've been checking out FreeNAS 10, they use bhyve as a hypervisor.  It seems very nice.  I could run FreeNAS and then set up a Linux VM and run minecraft off of that so as to not disrupt the rest of the system.

Keep in mind that FreeNAS 10 is still in Beta. I'm sure it works fairly well at this point, but there could still be instability and system-breaking bugs lurking around. I myself just installed FreeNAS 9.10 since it's the newest official stable release. Hopefully it won't be difficult to upgrade to version 10 when it gets released into the Stable stream.

[Grifulkin]

6 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Keep in mind that FreeNAS 10 is still in Beta. I'm sure it works fairly well at this point, but there could still be instability and system-breaking bugs lurking around. I myself just installed FreeNAS 9.10 since it's the newest official stable release. Hopefully it won't be difficult to upgrade to version 10 when it gets released into the Stable stream.

While I understand that it is in Beta, and not fully tested.  My use case is more of I want it, rather than a I need it.  So while it would suck if I have a catastrophic failure, I don't think I'll be losing any sleep if it does.

[dalekphalm]

5 minutes ago, Grifulkin said:

While I understand that it is in Beta, and not fully tested.  My use case is more of I want it, rather than a I need it.  So while it would suck if I have a catastrophic failure, I don't think I'll be losing any sleep if it does.

Good man. The best reason to use it, then I almost went with ver. 10. I just decided at the last minute to go with Stable instead.

[transposedmessenger]

On 1/21/2017 at 11:36 PM, dalekphalm said:

Just as an FYI, the RAM rule of thumb in FreeNAS (ZFS specifically) is 8GB minimum, otherwise 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage. You can go lower than 8GB if you're running a very small pool, but if you have a 12TB pool, you don't need 20GB of RAM - 12GB should suffice. With that in mind, the system the OP is looking at has 48GB, which is plenty.

I just setup a FreeNAS server over the last week. It certainly has it's benefits and cons. I'm running 6x 3TB HDD's in a RAIDZ1 array (Equivalent to a RAID5 array) - 18TB raw, 15TB usable, 12.5TiB formatted.

 

I've got two Jails running:

Plex and Transmission

 

The only thing FreeNAS doesn't seem to do well is acting as a VM host. You can install VirtualBox on it, but apparently without hardware virtualization support.

 

The FreeNAS 10 Beta has a Linux based virtualization mechanism running, which is supposedly set to launch in the next Stable release.

 

The only big downside I've seen so far with my setup is moving files within the Pool. If I copy files on the network share to another location on the network share, I'm limited in copy speeds to the connection of the device I'm running. I'm on WIFI 2 floors above my server, so the speeds are a bit slow. I've actually resorted to SSH-ing into the FreeNAS server so I can run the copy command "locally", which is obviously way faster.

 

Not sure exactly why that seems to be the case, but since FreeNAS doesn't have a GUI file explorer, it's kind of annoying. This may not affect other people though, or even be a problem even if it does. It could be related to my setup in some way.

I'm curious, how easy was that to set up on FreeNAS? I gave it a try but it really didn't like the USB I was using I think. I did a jailed Plex on my NAS4free and it was easy enough. N4F has a file explorer through the webgui but it's pretty basic.

[kevinb2001]

The one you're looking at looks like they have all dimm slots filled to hit 48gb so a mixture of 2 & 4gb dimms.

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerEdge-R710-Server-Dual-X5550-QC-2-66GHz-144GB-2-5in-Rails-RPS-H700-/172498914994?hash=item2829bc8eb2:g:AywAAOSw-0xYc9NY

 

That seller has 10 in stock for about $150 more but it comes with 18x 8gb dimms already, not sure how much storage you're wanting to grow into with freenas but it'd be cheaper than deciding to upgrade the ram in the first one later.

[TLN]

CPU's are quite old, but if you already own it - who cares.

Install ESXi, put everything in it (you have enough memory) and you're done! Should be relatively easy.

[Grifulkin]

2 hours ago, kevinb2001 said:

The one you're looking at looks like they have all dimm slots filled to hit 48gb so a mixture of 2 & 4gb dimms.

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerEdge-R710-Server-Dual-X5550-QC-2-66GHz-144GB-2-5in-Rails-RPS-H700-/172498914994?hash=item2829bc8eb2:g:AywAAOSw-0xYc9NY

 

That seller has 10 in stock for about $150 more but it comes with 18x 8gb dimms already, not sure how much storage you're wanting to grow into with freenas but it'd be cheaper than deciding to upgrade the ram in the first one later.

I've decided to get a better cpu, so I'm now thinking of going with http://www.ebay.com/itm/371842504210 this server.  I don't think I would ever need 144GB of RAM.