Best completely free type 1 hypervisor and manager?

[Electronics Wizardy]

53 minutes ago, Laggger164 said:

Anyways, I found this switch:

 

https://www.netgear.com/business/products/switches/unmanaged/JGS516.aspx?cid=wmt_netgear_organic

 

http://servershop.sk/netgear-prosafe-16-port-gigabit-switch-jgs516-/p207635c1051

 

But it is an unmanaged switch. Should I get a managed one?

you probably don't need a managed one. Getting a managed one gives you things like vlans, jumbo frames, teaming, and some other goodies, but for your use you don't really seem to need them

[Laggger164]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

you probably don't need a managed one. Getting a managed one gives you things like vlans, jumbo frames, teaming, and some other goodies, but for your use you don't really seem to need them

Alright then, will that one be fine?

 

I found the same one used for 20€ or a bit less, on that refurbisher it is 50€ with a 2 year warranty. Worth it or not?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Laggger164 said:

Alright then, will that one be fine?

 

I found the same one used for 20€ or a bit less, on that refurbisher it is 50€ with a 2 year warranty. Worth it or not?

id get the used one. The price looks good. Those switches haven't really changed for 10+ years.

[Laggger164]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

id get the used one. The price looks good. Those switches haven't really changed for 10+ years.

OK then. About that IP adress, if it was shared across multiple networks, would that be a problem? Or what would I have to change?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Laggger164 said:

OK then. About that IP adress, if it was shared across multiple networks, would that be a problem? Or what would I have to change?

you couldn't easily host servers unless you use a vpn

[Laggger164]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

you couldn't easily host servers unless you use a vpn

Well I was already thinking about making a VPN anyways...

 

I saw OpenVPN, are there better options?

[Laggger164]

14 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

you couldn't easily host servers unless you use a vpn

I just found this article on Virtualizing FreeNAS:

 

http://www.freenas.org/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/

 

I wanted to virtualize it since the beginning, but now I am hesitant to do so.

Let's say I have a Flash drive for the Hypervisor and 3 4TB Harddrives.

 

How should I set up RAID 5 to those disks? I am getting more and more confused, what do I use to set up the RAID array? The BIOS, ESXi or what?

 

So if I was to virtualize FreeNAS, should I make those precautions which they so conveniently provide?

How much capacity should I reserve for FreeNAS? Most of it and leave like 0.5TB at most for any Shenanigans I come up with and another 0.5 for things like the VPN server and stuff? Or should that be in the FreeNAS VM too?

 

Me is so confused

 

EDIT: I just found this awesome article, I haven't read it entirely, but it seems to help.

 

https://b3n.org/freenas-9-3-on-vmware-esxi-6-0-guide/

 

I still don't know what to actually do, I need to learn it now when I have time because at university and work there will not be so much time.

 

So how do I install it actually?

I have a server with only the RAM, CPUs, the RAID card and the network card. And of course the motherboard.

I put a USB drive with an ESXi bootable image into the internal USB slot and then what?

Do I put some random SATA drive into it for the OS to boot or something?

Then when I will want to install FreeNAS, do I install it on a virtual disk drive and start putting in the big, new NAS harddrives so FreeNAS can us them? How would I set up RAID then?

 

I am thinking I am taking too much time from you, should I go find an IRC channel and ask questions there? Thank you so much!

Edited April 3, 2017 by Laggger164

[Laggger164]

3 hours ago, Laggger164 said:

I just found this article on Virtualizing FreeNAS:

 

http://www.freenas.org/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/

 

I wanted to virtualize it since the beginning, but now I am hesitant to do so.

Let's say I have a Flash drive for the Hypervisor and 3 4TB Harddrives.

 

How should I set up RAID 5 to those disks? I am getting more and more confused, what do I use to set up the RAID array? The BIOS, ESXi or what?

 

So if I was to virtualize FreeNAS, should I make those precautions which they so conveniently provide?

How much capacity should I reserve for FreeNAS? Most of it and leave like 0.5TB at most for any Shenanigans I come up with and another 0.5 for things like the VPN server and stuff? Or should that be in the FreeNAS VM too?

 

Me is so confused

 

EDIT: I just found this awesome article, I haven't read it entirely, but it seems to help.

 

https://b3n.org/freenas-9-3-on-vmware-esxi-6-0-guide/

 

I still don't know what to actually do, I need to learn it now when I have time because at university and work there will not be so much time.

 

So how do I install it actually?

I have a server with only the RAM, CPUs, the RAID card and the network card. And of course the motherboard.

I put a USB drive with an ESXi bootable image into the internal USB slot and then what?

Do I put some random SATA drive into it for the OS to boot or something?

Then when I will want to install FreeNAS, do I install it on a virtual disk drive and start putting in the big, new NAS harddrives so FreeNAS can us them? How would I set up RAID then?

 

I am thinking I am taking too much time from you, should I go find an IRC channel and ask questions there? Thank you so much!

Or I could also use OpenMediaVault or other similar software...

There are so many options, I don't know which one to decide on first.

[Laggger164]

19 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Look at the number under the search box here https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whats+my+ip&t=ffab&ia=answer

 

Is it the same as your neighbors, or different. Your not hosting anything without a vpn if its the same.

Alright, the public IP is shared across multiple homes, if I want to I can have my own IP set up for 7€ and then 2€ every month. (Nope, fak dat sh*t) 

 

It's not really that important if I want a VPN anyways, right?

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 hours ago, Laggger164 said:

Or I could also use OpenMediaVault or other similar software...

There are so many options, I don't know which one to decide on first.

That server has a hardware raid card so you don't want to use something like zfs to do raid in software. 

 

I'd probably suggest something other than esxi as its bad at managing storage on the host. If you just put linux on there then you can easily make a file share on the host os and still run vms.  

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, Laggger164 said:

Alright, the public IP is shared across multiple homes, if I want to I can have my own IP set up for 7€ and then 2€ every month. (Nope, fak dat sh*t) 

 

It's not really that important if I want a VPN anyways, right?

If you want to host stuff publicly you either need a ip for you home(well not always but you should) or pit all your traffic over a vpn. 

[Laggger164]

7 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

That server has a hardware raid card so you don't want to use something like zfs to do raid in software. 

 

I'd probably suggest something other than esxi as its bad at managing storage on the host. If you just put linux on there then you can easily make a file share on the host os and still run vms.  

But I already started learning ESXi... 

 

Well if I won't be able to use ZFS or FreeNAS, what else could I use with ESXi and not f*ck up the entire system? I also want to be able to use PLEX, if you know of a better free alternative then I am listening, but I didn't find one myself.

[Electronics Wizardy]

49 minutes ago, Laggger164 said:

Well if I won't be able to use ZFS or FreeNAS, what else could I use with ESXi and not f*ck up the entire system?

Just make a disk image for storage and use something like openmediavault or debian or centos to share it. You can then access that share with the plex vm

[Laggger164]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Just make a disk image for storage and use something like openmediavault or debian or centos to share it. You can then access that share with the plex vm

OpenMediaVault, OK then!

 

So I should use the hardware RAID card with maybe 3 or 4 HDD in RAID 5.

 

This is how I think I would go about getting the server up and running:

 

I would plug in the HDD into the server and set up the RAID 5 config.

 

I would plug in a USB flash drive with ESXi on it and install it.

 

Then I would configure it as best I can/know and start making VMs.

VMs would first be OpenMediaVault since it is the primary focus of the server and I would configure that. I would give it what, 2-4 cores? I don't know? And maybe 8GB of RAM or less?

 

After that, I would install another VM with Ubuntu server so I can set up a game server for games like Left 4 Dead, Unturned, Team Fortress 2, Minecraft, etc.

That would require at least 4 cores and maybe 8GB of RAM. Those servers won't be running simultaneously, just one at a time with a few friends.

 

Also I could use that Linux VM to do other things which I don't know about right now.

 

Which of these things should I change and what should I add?

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, Laggger164 said:

I would give it what, 2-4 cores? I don't know? And maybe 8GB of RAM or less?

Id give it 2gb of ram(you really dont need much) and 2 cores. You really don't need to give it much

 

4 minutes ago, Laggger164 said:

After that, I would install another VM with Ubuntu server so I can set up a game server for games like Left 4 Dead, Unturned, Team Fortress 2, Minecraft, etc.

That would require at least 4 cores and maybe 8GB of RAM

Id run all of then in a seprate vm, just to keep things separared. You can give it more ram, it will only use what it needs on the host.

 

[Laggger164]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id give it 2gb of ram(you really dont need much) and 2 cores. You really don't need to give it much

 

Id run all of then in a seprate vm, just to keep things separared. You can give it more ram, it will only use what it needs on the host.

 

Alright, so OVM doesn't need much. Got it!

 

All of them in a separate VM? Why the hell not?

I could even configure them to auto-start the server program!

 

So the server setup is good? At least from what you can read?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Laggger164 said:

All of them in a separate VM? Why the hell not?

if your not gonna run them in vm's why not just run linux on the box?

 

Just now, Laggger164 said:

So the server setup is good? At least from what you can read?

yep looks fine, you can always play with it more later.

[Laggger164]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

if your not gonna run them in vm's why not just run linux on the box?

 

yep looks fine, you can always play with it more later.

Well you did help me a lot here, thank you!

 

So I would get a 270€ server, I'll see if I can get the price down a bit though.

I would also get the RAID card for 70€.

Then I would get the Netgear switch for 20€ (worst case)

Then I would need to get the hard drives, which I still don't know what capacity and how many.

I have decided on WD drives, but not on the final capacity nor the drive capacity... I have read some articles about it, it seems that around 4TB of storage should be fine, but I am not sure, we still have those tape casettes and DVDs that I need to digitalize, however they shouldn't take up much space right? (google incoming)

[Electronics Wizardy]

10 minutes ago, Laggger164 said:

I have decided on WD drives, but not on the final capacity nor the drive capacity... I have read some articles about it, it seems that around 4TB of storage should be fine, but I am not sure, we still have those tape casettes and DVDs that I need to digitalize, however they shouldn't take up much space right? (google incoming)

Dvd's take about 1-2gb with a modern codec(they normally use mpeg2, with h265 you can make them much smaller with the same quality) tapes are in the hundreds of megs

 

For drives, if you only need 4tb, id just get a few 2tb drives, then you can keep the current raid card.

[Laggger164]

8 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Dvd's take about 1-2gb with a modern codec(they normally use mpeg2, with h265 you can make them much smaller with the same quality) tapes are in the hundreds of megs

 

For drives, if you only need 4tb, id just get a few 2tb drives, then you can keep the current raid card.

Well, according to my calculations (such a good sentence there) I would pay around 600€ for 6 2TB harddrives to get 10TB of usable space.

I could also pay 490€ for 3 4TB drives and get 8TB of usable space.

 

Let's say I would go for the 6TB capacity, just to have more headroom.

I would pay 400€ for 4 2TB drives to get 6TB of capacity.

Or 378€ for 3 3TB drives to also get 6TB of capacity. BUT if I added those 70€ to this, it would become less effective. I would use a bit less power, but that's it. Although, if I added that RAID card, I wouldn't have to upgrade for a long time. Still, I could just keep the 2TB drives running and get an external box if I really had to get more storage, which most likely won't happen.

 

Also, I spoke to my dad about when would he be able to actually make this project with me and also have the money for it. No NAS server until mid-May.

[Laggger164]

30 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Dvd's take about 1-2gb with a modern codec(they normally use mpeg2, with h265 you can make them much smaller with the same quality) tapes are in the hundreds of megs

 

For drives, if you only need 4tb, id just get a few 2tb drives, then you can keep the current raid card.

The only real reason I am hesitant to do it now is the price of harddrives. 400€ for 4 2TB drives is a lot, the harddrives themselves will cost more than the server, the switch, the cabling and even the wireless router combined.

 

However, I would only really need the switch, cables and the server to start tinkering with it, just to see how it works and to test what works best. All of these could go for the price of 300€ combined.

 

What do you think? Should I try to get those now/week later or just wait until mid May and do it properly? I don't know yet what could go wrong, I would really want to test it until I go full blown with it.  

[Electronics Wizardy]

41 minutes ago, Laggger164 said:

What do you think? Should I try to get those now/week later or just wait until mid May and do it properly? I don't know yet what could go wrong, I would really want to test it until I go full blown with it.  

If you know your gonna get the server, id just get it now, and get the drives later. You can always put some small cheap drives in for testing.

[Laggger164]

14 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If you know your gonna get the server, id just get it now, and get the drives later. You can always put some small cheap drives in for testing.

Alright, I will try to convince him to buy just the switch and the server. I might add some of my own money too, just to help out that way.

 

Anyways I would want to install CrashPlan backup software (or similar) on OpenMediaVault, I remember there is a plugin system on OMV right? And that I can install my own software as a plugin, with a bit of work. If it supports linux, which I believe CrashPlan is on Linux.

 

Or is it just a client software that puts backups on whatever storage I specify?

 

https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/

Edited April 4, 2017 by Laggger164

[Electronics Wizardy]

8 hours ago, Laggger164 said:

 

Or is it just a client software that puts backups on whatever storage I specify?

crashplain seems to be a bit of a pain on omv, but you should be able to get it working.

[Laggger164]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

crashplain seems to be a bit of a pain on omv, but you should be able to get it working.

What else could I use?