I'm using Linux for almost 2 years on my desktop pc and now I want to learn more about Linux server administration. I think a home server is a great place to do this. The upcoming holidays are a good opportunity for me to build my home server and now I'm looking for parts. The server should run a linux distro with maybe 3-4 vm's, a web server, a NAS/file server and one or two other distros for testing things. I have no experience with picking server parts. The system should only use up to 100W (still a student and a kWh = 0,26€).
I found some options like an older xeon E3 or a newer i5 or something exotic like an motherboard/cpu embedded combo.
It would be nice if someone can give me a guideline on how to pick the right server parts. It can cost up to 400-450€.
You don't need a million cores to run a bunch of VMs, especially if you don't need super high performance. RAM helps, but you really don't need a lot for what you want to do. Just think about what services you want to run and how much resources those need, the difference between running them on a single host verses separate VMs is very little, especially if you use containers rather than full VMs.
If you want something super low power the avoton boards are very good, they seem expensive but you get a lot for the money. Any half decent low powered CPU will work for you, running it under 100W should be no problem at all unless you use older power hungry hardware.
It depends on what he wants to do with the web server and the NAS, but I my approach is to find old laptops and use them for single purpose servers. A friends old one that has a dead battery and has long since been replaced by a new laptop altogether, or a dumpster find, or a $70 second hand 2010 era dual core, and so on. If they are not under heavy load all of the time they'll idle at 20-something watts.
The C7250 boards are quite expensive. My recommendation is a used HP Z400. You can get 5 HDD's in them (3 in the 5.25" bay, 2 in the 3.5" bay), support six core processors, and 24GB ECC Ram (unregistered).
Currently, I have a Z400 with a W3520, 10GB Ram, and around 6 HDD's. At idle, it uses around 50W, or 30W with only 2HDD's on.
Your file server and web server VM most likely won't be in use very often, so it wouldn't increase the power usage of the system much.
100w is possible but ur doing what I"m doing.. making a strong PFSense router. I'm thinking of using PCs that utilize the J1900, J2900 and Intel 3000-6000 series duo/quad core PC. Most of them are using 100W+ pico PSU. I'm thinking of 160w just to be on the safe side. I think you can only get them at quietpc.com and ebay.
But yea running more than 2VM on a 100w setup, I think that's pretty much impossible unless you count DOS and linux as 2 VMs.
wow coming from the Z800 series, I didn't know it was it was that effective. Always considered HP/Dell to have very ineffiecent PSU since they're not rated 80+ gold etc... that's pretty amazing I might have to considering build one for a server in the future instead of z800.
I have a Dell T20 with Celeron G3220 and 16gb of RAM running Freenas 9.10. I have Gitlab, Zoneminder, Unifi Controller all in their own separate Ubuntu VM with iohyve. 20-25% cpu usage at idle. Everything runs great. Zoneminder doing motion detection from 2 1080p Amcrest poe cameras. Eventually gonna upgrade to xeon 4 core. Something you can look into for cheap. Dell T20 are going for around 200-250 at the moment and i think some places have the xeon 4 core for 250 right now. They come with 4gb ram and 1tb hard drive.
Thanks for all of these recommendations. I think the T20 or the Z400 are my way to go. The avoton boards are very nice but a little bit too expensive. There are only T20s for around 300-350€ available but they have already a xeon 4 core prozessor equipped and if I upgrade the system to 16gb of ram then this should be a very nice system (in my opinion).
