Hello!
I am trying to step up my game for a future move, and I am needing advice on setting up a home network. Right now, I have two routers, one for the front end of the house, and one for the back end. They are both consumer grade cheap routers that you could pick up at any store. The capabilities are limited, and the back end of the house has very noticeable latency, which makes playing video games somewhat difficult. In the new home, I have decided to opt for a “commercial” grade setup by building my own router, NAS, and a server for storing virtual machines. Only problem is: I am in no way a network specialist. I have no clue about setting up a pfsense machine, freeNAS, or a VM server. Any suggestions?
Here are my plans. I want a server rack, with the 3(?) machines on it. I don’t want a lot of PCs around the room doing different things, I want them to be in a central location. Second, I will be needing a network switch I’m sure; as I have at least ten ethernet capable devices in my room, and I will be needing to run two ethernet cords to another room, as there are PCs in there as well. With the access point being in my room, I will need a second access point to be located in another room for reliable coverage. The NAS will not only be used for storage, but for Plex as well. My main concern is that I only want other users to be able to use the Plex side of the NAS. I want the storage partition to be private for myself only. Can I set the default download location for Windows to be on the server? Is that possible?
Lastly, what kind of components can be used on a server such as this? Normal PC components that fit in the chassis? Special hardware? Can I reuse some parts, other than HDDs?
Thanks so much for the help guys, I knew this would be the only place I could get help from.
Also, you look good today.
let me just say if you are not going to build to Freenas's recommended specs you may want to skip if for one of the other options out there as I am having some headaches with it right now, secondly I do not remember there being an easy way to do a VM with freenas.
You might look into RockStor... it uses BTRFS, which IMHO is better than ZFS anyways (it's more modern and more sensible, but isn't as "mature").... you can apply CentOS over it cause it runs off the Redhat kernel... and use VMM on it... I built a Xeon 1231 v3 based server at work with 32GB RAM and 12TB of WD Red storage in RAID 10 with the OS on a Samsung 840 Pro last year and it runs like a tank... I had to VM Windows Server Essentials 2012 on it to run our clock-in/clock-out program because it was windows based and the only problem I've had with the whole setup is I have to restart the Windows VM once a month or so or it gets runtime errors...
I run RockStor as the NAS side and Windows Server as a dropbox for customers/clock system... I built it in a mATX Nanoxia case with all day-to-day components... added tons of fans just cause and the Linux side has NEVER had a problem...
If you have any questions feel free to ask... :)
Thanks, but I plan on exceeding the minimum requirements. I'm sure it won't be difficult running VMs off the network right? It should be like using them locally, just on a network drive if I'm correct.
RockStor looks awesome! Is it free?
What are the benefits of using it over the mainstream FreeNAS?
Is it as reliable and is it as quick?
Pardon my ignorance, I only know as much as I've Googled.
thats not what I said you need to build to Bare minimum their Recommended specs and only using the recommended hardware. Long gone are the days in my opinion of being able to take your old machine cramming the 8 gigs of ram in and calling it a day with FreeNas as my current experience has show.
With my recent personal experience I just called it quits on trying to get FreeNas to run on my hardware after I finally figured out what was going wrong as it should not take as much effort for it just to boot up not to mention be able to write to all the drives it sees. I am currently just setting up a Ubuntu 14 server which will have the nas storage along with FTP server that I need for the office instead.
Rockstor isn't as RAM dependent due to the use of BTRFS over ZFS... it's open-sourced, free, reliable, fast, and you can dual-boot it on CentOS with gnome, KDE, cinnamon (or any other flavor of GUI) if you want to hook up a monitor and not be stuck in the console... you can do anything you would use a server for at that point since it's RHEL based and Rockstor runs on the same kernel... given that you yum the appropriate packages for whatever you're trying to set up...
IMHO it's a LOT better than FreeNAS... some people prefer FreeNAS because ZFS is a more mature file system (which in laymen's terms means older).... but you can software raid in basically any standard config via RockStor, take snapshots, everything FreeNAS will do...
Like I said I had a server build for my company last year and went with Rockstor with CentOS and the only thing that ever has any trouble is Windows Server Essentials needs to be rebooted in VMM every month or so, and I attribute that to Windows being Windows... never had the NAS side fail...