I’m moving into a new home, and with that comes a new rack setup. Currently I have a Synology DS1315+, mostly running on fumes. I believe it’s been running for about 7 years now (original drives, ~8tb usable space) - but it’s time to start thinking about moving on.
Currently I’m running unifi gear, but I also plan to upgrade to the pro / rack variants when we move.
I’m looking for some recommendations for a couple of rack mounted servers to replace the NAS, and a virtualization server - with XCP-ng in mind.
For the nas;
I would like to run a PLEX. Currently have an nvidia shield handling this but would like something more robust.
Will look into FreeNAS or Unraid, undecided as yet.
Want something hands off once setup, easily hot swappable drives etc.
Don’t need massive space. Perhaps 10tb or so, 5 drives?
For the virtualization server;
Nothing particularly fancy required
Would need to run Windows + SQL (Work requirements…)
various linux machines depending on the day.
Really I’m just not sure what my best options are re: second hand machines - and if there are any specific configurations I should watch out for, and where to look for reliable hardware!
Yeah - I was considering the option of grabbing a server, sticking XCP-ng on it and passing through the controller for raid - but I suspect keeping the hardware distinct here might be more appropriate.
Budget - is hard. Maybe around $250 per server not including drives? I really don’t have a decent gauge on what I can get a for a decent price in the refurb / second hand market… so options here would be good. I was looking at the Dell R710’s but I don’t know if they’re an appropriate option given my circumstances?
Go with a straight distro for your server needs and learn a bit about the administration side of it. web gui distros hide so much, it’s a black box when something goes wrong. I prefer Fedora, I like the six month update schedule. Others prefer something like Arch that’s constantly updating, while others like Centos that seems to never update. Keep the host simple, virtualize all the things. That minimizes maintenance and reboots.
They do, but both freenas and unraid have great documentation so not really a big deal. I havent run into almost anything I can remember needing to go to CLI for and I have been using Freenas for almost a decade now. I would say if you have the time doing everything CLI is better tho.
So - to be clear, I have a fair amount of cli knowledge. I’ve built madm arrays in the past, and run a fedora box now, but I don’t want to deal with that hassle for the nas. I have less time in my life these day’s to have to deal with that… so i’m looking more for options that give me ease of use - and time efficiency. That’s primarily why I purchased the Synology box back in the day.
Also - I’m really after the hardware options. Most of my time has been with consumer hardware that I’ve twisted to my needs, but moving into the rack space is now opening options I’ve never had to deal with before.
Like - what’s a good rack server to buy? What raid card should I go with, if any? Are there certain configurations more suited to what I need? Are the xeon’s good for plex decoding, or should I offload that service elsewhere? Are the onboard nic’s on said server ok, or should I throw in an intel nic? Are the dell R710’s a good option, or not?
HP DL380 Gen8 should fit in your price range. See if you can get one with ILO Advanced enabled for management, makes a big difference. I’m partial to Intel (HP or Dell) nics, x520 SFP+ cards under $100 on ebay, sometimes under $60 even. Onboard nics are fine, usually a decent chipset like Intel or Broadcom.
Don’t know much about Dell hardware, I run a pretty much HPE shop.
Xeons are no good for Plex hardware accel. You want a desktop processor with Intel QSV (iGPU), or an nVidia card (Quadro P400), although the nvidia only does encoding, no decode accel.
Is someone else paying the electric bill in the new house? Old servers are really pigs when it comes to electric usage. Old 180+ watt Xeons (sandybridge/ivybridge era) have a pretty poor performance per watt rating compared to something more modern (and expensive), so you save a little $ up front and spend more $$ over time on the electric.
Hmm, I think you have your CPU generations mixed up there, LGA1155 (Sandy/Ivy bridge) CPUs are pretty decent when it comes to power consumption. Especially if you stick to the v2 series. I have an Xeon E3-1240 v2 based system that uses 40-ish Watt at idle (will have to re-measure since I managed to either not write it down or lose the data, ugh. Note, no spinning rust).
I wouldn’t go older than LGA1156 for something that runs 24/7 (used in the commonly recommended R710 systems) though.
Also note that registered ECC memory uses more power than unregistered.
i’d recommend something like a Pentium (with ecc) for freenas, and a ryzen 2600 or better for the virtualization. asus b450 STRIX -f is a nice mobo for server, with 3x x16 pcie slots
I would have to agree. (Speaking as someone slowly transitioning from Westmere to Ivy bridge)
If Xeon is what you’re after, It is still tough to beat the compute per dollar of Ivy bridge…especially if you need a lot of memory (RDIMM DDR3 is still pretty cheap and available). unless you score some really good deal or have a source.
For the freenas box I’d also recommend rolling your own. Mainly so you can get a compatible HBA, rather than something picky. Dell hardware is usually good for freenas as their PERC cards are LSI clones. Consider where a simple server and separate disk shelf will give you more flexibility, although for $250 that will be tight.
As others have said you will need ivybtidge or newer for reasonable virtualisation support. I run proxmox on a thinkstation s30 (x79) and it barely has the features I need. There are some good deals on haswell / x99 starting to appear and this is the first gen to do IOMMU properly. That said you can get brand new Ryzen 6 cores and b450 board for less than $200 and will do most of what you need.
What do you mean by work requirements? If this is going to have production workloads you may want to invest more than $250 for resilience and longevity.
