Hi,
I just built a server with a Celeron G530, 8GB of DDR3 and two 1TB HDDs along with a 500GB. I also have a 250GB as the boot drive. I plan to run the first 3 in JBOD to get as much storage as possible. Don’t worry, I have a plan for backup and nothing on there is mission critical, mostly music and movies. Anyway, I need help deciding on what operating system I should put on the server. I have minimal Linux experience but I am open to learning. I was going to use Windows Server 2012 R2 but then I looked at the price tag and died a little inside. Besides being a local file server I want to be able to use this server as an FTP and possibly some other light server duties like possibly running a game server (not sure though). Would really appreciate any input you guys have!
Thanks,
Kellen
Well if you want a full fledged server CentOS is pretty good
https://www.centos.org/
If you are looking for something a little easier to set-up then maybe Rockstor, freenas (not using the zfs file system), and Amahi.
http://rockstor.com/
http://www.freenas.org/
https://www.amahi.org/
This may sound like a silly question but I have heard some really cool things like running VMs can be used in FreeNas using jails and other things like that. Is that true? Could I have a FreeNas storage system that also has VM of Windows that runs my VPN or something?
I believe its possible but I don't have any experience with it.
You can run a Jail with virtualbox running and using that you can run Windows or Linux VM's. Its really useful and you can do a lot with it.
Fedora 24 Workstation or Server is great!
You can do quite a bit with virtualization. However there is a learning curve and plethora of options.
First, for the OS for the storage array I recommend FreeNAS only because it is easy to use, and has ZFS if you want it. In addition it can be as complex or simple as you want it so you can learn and grow by toying around with FreeNAS.
Virtualizing freenas is OK, but most importantly you need to pass-through your storage controller to ensure freenas is the one managing the RAID.
You can run JAILS in freenas, but my experience, though on old enterprise HW, is that the jails kept failing, especially the plex media server. So moved away from jails.
So I prefer to virtualize freeNAS or keep it bare-metal, then host separate virtualization for everything else, media, cloud, etc.
There are great guide online for FreeNAS on VMware vSphere.
What did you end up going with? I'm in the same boat but i do have a copy of window server 2012 r2. i would like to host minecraft , back up my computers which are running windows 10. i also would like to do vms of other os. have it be a media server and file server for stuff i use across computer.