Dell PowerEdge R410 as a Home Server

[_hANSI]

Hi guys!

 

I just got my hands on a decomissioned Dell Poweredge R410 with 2 Xeon L5660s and 24GB of RAM (non EEC to my knowledge, but will check once it arrives).

 

Since I'm broke af, I will start off with an el cheapo 120GB SSD for the OS and a 2TB HDD I have lying around, but the plan is to throw in 3 WD reds for a Raid5 down the road,

 

My idea is to make it a home server with the following main functions:

 

- NAS

- Virtualisation host for some VMs to fiddle around with

- Host for a number of virtualised services for my home network (LXC or Docker or similar) like

1. DNS server for my home network (unbound)
2. Media Server
3. BitTorrent
4. etc

I have been testing FreeNAS, OMV and unRaid to provide the NAS functionality - I will probably go for OMV, with it being Debian based it is just much easier for me to maintain as my FreeBSD knowledge is close to zero and even though I liked unRaid I don't see the added value that would justify the pricetag.

 

In order to virtualise all my services and manage VMs with little hassle I was planning to use proxmox as a base system. My main question for you guys is:

 

What is your experience with running OMV in a virtualised environment with the hard drives being passed through? Been running it with some virtual disks without major hickups but read in some forums that Raid-Z does not work well with passed through hard drives since the virtio driver does not really play well with the controller level access ZFS requires. I was thinking of just using a software raid with Ext4 instead since I prefer a stable environment for my files over the last bit of performance. However I'm wondering if this is still an issue since most forum posts I can find are from around 5 years ago!

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id run proxmox on the host. Use zfs on the host for raid(raid z1 for 3x hdds, this also makes reds less important here)

 

Then use a little container with samba to share the folders.

 

 

[KirbyTech]

Get yourself a free ESXi and use that. Way better than most other solutions out there since it has a lot of support, you can use vCenter with ESXi and Veeam too for backups to another server. I run paid versions of it all through VMUG and it is great $200 USD a year I think is what I pay.

[tt2468]

16 hours ago, KirbyTech said:

Get yourself a free ESXi and use that. Way better than most other solutions out there since it has a lot of support, you can use vCenter with ESXi and Veeam too for backups to another server. I run paid versions of it all through VMUG and it is great $200 USD a year I think is what I pay.

Why use ESXi when you can use proxmox, which is free, and has every feature he needs? I've been using Proxmox in production for 2+ years and have never had any problems.

[NelizMastr]

1 hour ago, tt2468 said:

Why use ESXi when you can use proxmox, which is free, and has every feature he needs? I've been using Proxmox in production for 2+ years and have never had any problems.

ESXi is free as well, y'know  

 

 

[KirbyTech]

4 hours ago, tt2468 said:

Why use ESXi when you can use proxmox, which is free, and has every feature he needs? I've been using Proxmox in production for 2+ years and have never had any problems.

I have tested both and to me ESXi wins out, I tested on the free version so fair comparison there. I personally use VMUG licenses which are cheap and allow you to have better software for really cheap. 

 

While ESXi can not be free, it still wins out even the free version.