Setting up a home server

[C0RR0SIVE]

I have a question... Why did you choose the route you are going for your Host instead of going with ESX???

As for the OS drive... In all honesty I would mirror them depending on the amount of writes that will be occuring, having an SSD with any of your virtual machines on it, depending on the VM software, and the guest OS, can have some heavy writes going on... I dislike the idea of an SSD in use like this, better off with a good trio of SAS disks in R5 IMO... But if you know there wont be frequent writes, go for the SSD's in mirror.


I also have another concern... In one of your pictures, that looks like a 1U or 2U heatsink meant for a blower fan to be almost directly attached... Please tell me it has one attached, or that the heatsink is getting proper airflow...

As for testing the server memory, Memtest86 will work fine with ECC IMO, just don't enable the test that uses multiple cores, as it's VERY buggy and can give really bad results, it almost always fails the RAM.

I saw you are planning this for being in the basement, please tell me it's not damp or humid in it? That will cause serious issues long-term with a server, consider a good quality Dehumidifier near it, and possibly a HEPA air filter system.

 

[IntelFanboy417]

Really like the idea you had for putting the drives there. Please do post back how it turns out, I'll be curious to try this myself sometime in the future!

As for the melting point, I don't personally think your server will reach 95°C, but its not my server so not sure. Good luck though!

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Sorry c0rr0sive, to be honest, I have NO IDEA what ESXi is, haven't ever looked into it.


With the CPU heatsink, if you are referring to the one that the drive cage is on top of that isn't the CPU, it is just a chipset heatsink. The CPU's both have beefy heatsinks on them. They are the ones that came with the server. I will keep an eye on the temps.

The basement, the whole house actually isn't damp at all. If anything it is on the WAAAY dry end of the scale. All winter long it is static shocks on EVERYTHING.. Gets annoying...



Thanks IntelFanboy417. Building it so far has been MUCH easier than I expected. It is using materials that modelers use to modify kits, or scratch build models. And for the record, I am TERRIBLE at building models. LOL.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Was actually talking about the one closer to the IO shield...

ESX is basically an OS that lets you easily virtualize just about anything... It has a super-small footprint so you can use most all your hardware. The trick is, you have to use hardware that ESX supports. But, with that board having onboard USB ports the way it does for a USB flash drive, chances are the board as a whole supports some form of ESX...

To manage ESX you have what is called vSphere, some powerful stuff IMO, and it's completely free upto two physical processors if you use 5.5, the OS it self installs onto a flash drive instead of an HDD, that way you have as much free space on your disks...

The only downside I have found, unless you get a server meant specifically for ESX that has health monitoring built in, you won't know your temperatures, I am running ESX on consumer grade hardware with some stuff packed into the install image so that I can run Realtek and Nvidia components, so my host is a bit finicky, but it's very stable, and very powerful.

This isn't exactly a downside really since a server isn't meant to be rebooted, but if you ever do reboot with ESX and have a large amount of RAM, it can take awhile to boot. My machine has 12GB and takes about 3 minutes to boot to the point that it can start loading the VM's... Friend has a host with 256GB of RAM and it takes close to 20 minutes for it to load for him.

In all honesty, if you are still in the building and planning stages, it might be something worth playing around with to see how you like it. I feel it's far more stable and more powerful than VirtualBox, just about everyone I know that works in datacenters, or NOC's, or in just about any IT field where virtualization is used, ends up going the ESX route.

There are also third party tools out there that will let you take a physical machine, install an agent onto it, them import it directly into the host, haven't tried it my self, but a friend has used it with out issue a few times before.

 

[IntelFanboy417]

Excellent explanation c0rr0sive!

I would also suggest ESX for your server if you plan on using it for Virtualization only.
Only reason I personally chose the virtualbox route was mainly because I wanted the main machine to do other things along side with virtual box, ESX more or less restricts you to virtual machines only on the server (Not saying thats a bad thing).

I have been considering ESX though when I get my 2nd server, that will be fun to try out.

 

[StalemateBlack]

As a side note, IKEA's Lack side table can make an affordable rackmount if you're looking to save. Plus, you can get it in the color of your choice.

Kudos on the new toys.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

IntelFanboy417, the main reason I chose ESX is because I had too many physical servers running 24/7 with what I needed. Two routers, and a Server 2k8 install for WSUS, then I had a PLEX server...

Setting up the right settings allowed me to move all that into one good machine, so now my four main machines are three virtual machines. Never notice a hiccup in anything when someone feels like streaming from PLEX while they browse the internet. Just sucks you have no GUI, has to be accessed via a web management console, or via vSphere.

The key to ESX is finding the RIGHT balance of hardware for your VM's, with the RIGHT hardware that's designed or supported via ESX. That means you want hardware level controllers for everything and no software based controllers. Or you end up in a boat like me with no way to check SMART data, or temps, or anything of the sort. But I got luck enough that 12GB of RAM and a single Quadcore AMD Phenom could handle everything I was doing.

 

[carnageX]

So ESX is basically a hypervisor then? Isn't that what CentOS is?

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Yep, it's a Bare-Metal Hypervisor, never have played or looked into what CentOS really is, I just know most everyone I talk to anymore deploys ESX from VMWare now because of how reliable and small in nature it is, and supports pretty much anything from Intel, Adaptec, and if you put the available packages into the install disk, Realtek and Nvidia based products. Ton's of servers anymore are being built around ESX as a whole as well.

 

[carnageX]

^^Sweet, I'll have to look into it for when I upgrade my server to different hardware.

Sorry for hijacking your thread a bit, Ethereal .