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DrJohnZoidberg

DrJohnZoidberg

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Hey all,

I'm looking to upgrade my little home server to basically do everything that I am now using around my place (and more) and I'm looking for some advice on which route you think I should go with this.

I basically want to use a single machine with a one or two VM's to do a few things and want it to be flexible.

The machine specs I'm looking at is basically the following:

Intel Core i5 3470
8GB RAM
2 x PCI-e SATA expansion/RAID cards
8 x 2TB SATA drives
2 x Gigabit NICs

I have some of the hardware already like the case and PSU, which will accommodate this hardware fine.

One thing that I'm not too familiar with is why I'm asking for advice - I want to use ZFS (a stable native implementation) as my filesystem but I cannot do that with Linux so will need your guys' input.

This is what I want to do with the machine (in order of priority):

1. My NAS (preferably using ZFS) - two RAID5 pools of 4 drives each
2. My downloads (Sabnzbd, sickbeard, cp, etc)
3. Plex Media Server
4. Firewall
5. Windows Server 2008 VM (basically used as a testbed for me to learn more about it, and could use it for the Plex server)

The main issue is that I don't believe that Sabnzbd, sickbeard, etc work very well with FreeBSD based distros (and Plex won't run at all), so I was thinking of using FreeBSD as my main host OS, but I'm not sure of what virtualization to go with on this platform.

If I find a good VM solution then I would like to create on Linux VM for Sab/Sickbeard and Plex Media Server and then I can also set up my Windows Server on another VM.

Any and all advice would be appreciated, I'm hoping to have a plan together by the end of the month so I can start purchasing the hardware.

DrJZ
 
You don't really need to splash out on an i5 for that. HP Microserver costs less than R2K and will do everything you want it to.
 
FlatspinZA said:
You don't really need to splash out on an i5 for that. HP Microserver costs less than R2K and will do everything you want it to.
Click to expand...

I already have a MS for my media center.

MS cannot take 8 drives.
Performance is limiting for Plex transcoding.

Thanks for the input though.
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
I already have a MS for my media center.

MS cannot take 8 drives.
Performance is limiting for Plex transcoding.

Thanks for the input though.
Click to expand...

Point taken - I didn't pay attention to the OP as well as I should have. A board that can take 8 drives is going to cost in excess of R3K. Asus is solid. I will PM you pricing.
 
FlatspinZA said:
Point taken - I didn't pay attention to the OP as well as I should have. A board that can take 8 drives is going to cost in excess of R3K. Asus is solid. I will PM you pricing.
Click to expand...

Going with 2 x 4 port sata cards (also in the OP :)). Hardware is not the issue, I need recommendations on the software side.
 
Personally I'd have a look at Windows Home server for backups and serving as a media centre, with some Linux virtual machines doing other grunt work you can't do easily on home server. I see Server 2008 isn't badly priced at all and may be the better option especially if the rest of your PCs run Windows and you'd like to back them up regularly. I've had SabNZB and Sickbeard running on Server 2008 before and it worked pretty well, no hiccups to speak of.

As a firewall I highly recommend using a Linux virtual machine and installing Webmin for your proxy filtering and firewall needs. Server 2008's firewall is also pretty good and you could configure it as a proxy, but Webmin does it so much better and can be accessed through a browser. Plex should run just fine on Server 2008 as well, but as a NAS you'd have to change a few security things to make everything work smoothly.
 
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