Hi, so I have a PC with a Xeon E3-1241v3, 32gb non-ecc ram, Asus Z97-A motherboard and a GTX 750.
It currently has a random assortment of drives which I hope to upgrade to 2x8TB WD Reds (with 2-3 more a little while in the future).
I want to use it for Plex, VMs (likely swtiching from virtual box to ESXi), game servers, personal repos, a PFSense VM (once I get a second nic for it) and maybe a dev machine.
Ubuntu is out of the question since I've had nothing but trouble with it, Fedora is out as well.
My question is which OS would work best (not familiar with BSD, but am open to trying something like freeNAS etc), and how should I set up the drives? I was thinking a ZFS mirrored vdev, but I would like to expand it in the future, also how about BTRFS/software raid on the motherboard?
To clarify, you want to use ESXi, which is a hypervisor that installs on bare metal, to host your VM's or do you want an OS that runs some of the services and VM's on top of that?
Also I would be wary of BTRFS as it is still young but here are some links for more info on that. Arch Wiki on BTRFS BTRFS Status
Openmediavault might be what you are looking for. It is a nas oriented debian based distro and after installing the extra plugins repository it will have support for zfs, plex, virtualbox among other things.
You should definitely look into ESXi. Since you have 32GB of RAM you could think about using VMs for all of your different "projects". This would prevent dataloss or bigger catastrophes in case that you mess up something. If nothing has changed since version 5 you can use ESXi for free. You will not have some features enabled in the free version but it does not sound like you would need them anyways (like clustering and such). To prevent the nerd rage, yes the licenses are for vSphere and not ESXi I know that. You would need to check for compatibility though as ESXi is made for enterprise and not some backroom machines you build at home.
I can agree VMWare ESXi is nice for a hypervisor and has PCI passthrough. I use the free version at work for a test environment. The new web ui helps with management of VM's as well. It just sounds like @The_Space_Bear was looking to use the computer as a desktop and not just a server.
He mentioned ESXi in the OP anyways right? If you are correct and @The_Space_Bear wants a desktop PC then ESXi is pointless. If he wants a server though I believe ESXi is the thing for him to try out stuff and have contained systems that will not break each other. And PCIe passthrough is a nice touch if he plans on using the GTX 750 for any 3D acceleration, right?
@nakamura that sounds just what I need, I'll take a look!
@ww2m1911a1 I have used debian, the ubuntu weirdness stems from unity and the GPU drivers irrc, I rebooted my server just to have it get stuck in a boot sequence and I couldn't fix it until I got home, not very happy.
@Bayden don't know if I would actually use it as a desktop to be honest here. just something that I would like to keep on the table I guess, I'll go read up on ESXi since it seems I really need to do that.
ESXi is very selective on HBA and LAN controllers. But if you have MB with Intel only SATA ports and Intel LAN you are safe. I see that it is the case of Asus Z97-A.
Honestly if you are wanting a home server, you might want to just grab a cheap little 1U or 2U server and use that as a dedicated server provided you can keep it sufficiently cool.
Okay. A lot of people gave their 2c already and I'm here to give mine. A few points:
You will be constantly banging your head if you use pfsense in a VM. I did it for a while and it was a pain in the ass whenever I had to work on the hardware or the power went out and the server shut down.
I use Proxmox in a HA cluster and it works wonderfully. Also supports Linux containers, so making Linux VM's has next to no overhead. I choose Proxmox over ESXi every day of the week because of how robust it is and the additional hardware compatibility.
ZFS mirrored is good, but keep in mind the following: RAID is not a backup and you can't remove vdevs, so you can't change that later on without losing your data.
BTRFS is good in some instances, but for what you're doing, you're best off with ZFS.
On the topic of OS to use on top of proxmox, you'll probably want something like OpenMediaVault. Personally, I would build out the deployment manually, but that's for people who enjoy tinkering.
@Bayden ESXi will be compatible with his system, it's just not my first choice for a number of reasons, not the least of which, VMWare's blatant disregard of the GPL, but that's a discussion for a different thread.