Whats on your Home Server

liamcrane

liamcrane

liamcrane

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Hi guys,

Would love to get an insight to what different approaches people have to setting up there home server and what you actually have running.

I have a media HTPC setup on a 64gb SSD with 4tb of WD Reds which i use as the storage media for the house with Stablebit used to combine the drives. I wanted to go down the Hyper V or ESXi route but as i needed a dedicated HTPC with a tv tuner etc i had to make that the front end and ended up having to use VM Ware Workstation to do the virtual side of things.

I have an iTunes VM i installed on windows from an old key i had laying around as i wanted to keep this well away from everything as i dont like all the rubbish that comes with itunes! Just setup my first linux server (Ubuntu) which i have just installed Sabnzbd on and it seems to work pretty good. Setup SSH on it although never used it before so learning that at the mo as well as Samba.

Also have Xpenology on another VM as i really like the software and mainly just use it for the photo station so i can upload all my photos from my iphone straight onto the server via DS Photo.

I have all my Workstation VM's stored on the 4tb WD Reds in the storage pool but i was wondering if it would be better to have them running on a serparate data drive and then have them backup to the WD Reds pool? What do you think?

Be good to hear everyone elses setups
 
So, I think I have a reasonable amount of kit for stuff.

I have one FX6100 AMD setup as my essentials server 2012 r2 with DVB-S2 cards for Sky NZ. This acts as my primary domain controller for the house network and is a baremetal machine.

I have a storage server consisting of 12 hotswap drives running Xpenology on an older atom based supermicro board with LSI raid card.

I have a Dell R410 1u server with an X5550 running 20GB Ram as esxi host #1 (exchange servers, development machines etc.)

1 HP 8200 SFF with 16Gb ram as esxi host #2, this generally runs similar software to #1 as redundancy.

multiple HTPC clients around the home running mediaportal client. Will probably roll all the HTPC clients in to a new host, esxi host #3, and share round the house using HDMI and USB cards.

I am in the process of creating a new esxi host from my gaming hardware which will allow me to dump that in the rack and use Steam streaming etc. to access it from any room with the HTPC installed... Mainly as I'm in the process of losing the office due to 2nd child...
 
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My primary own-built server runs Windows 7 Ultimate as the base OS (I didn't want ESXI) with 4570k & 32GB ram... with vmware running as software on top of that.

One of my other servers I'm testing out Server 2012 while it's waiting for hard drives.

And the other is running Windows 7 Ultimate again... prefer it to 8.1 :p
 
Main server:
I3 2120, 16gb ecc, ssd is drive with 4x2tb drives in raid 10 running Ubuntu server 14.04 with plex server, samba and transmission. Also have a 3tb was red for internal backups.

Second server:
Hpn54l with ssd os and 3x250gb drives in raid 5 running Ubuntu desktop, main server backs up photos to the raid array also

Third server:
Hpn54l running esxi, win 7 running for a windows remote box

Offsite:
Have an i3 1u custom build in colo running Ubuntu server for mumble and a hdd with a copy of my pics in case stuff really hits the fan.
 
liamcrane said:
I wanted to go down the Hyper V or ESXi route but as i needed a dedicated HTPC with a tv tuner etc i had to make that the front end and ended up having to use VM Ware Workstation to do the virtual side of things.
Click to expand...

You could still try ESXi, my HTPC is a virtual machine with USB and graphics card passed through the host into the guest.
EDIT: You might need to check your hardware for this, you need VT-d capable kit.


As far as my setup goes I've got the following:

FreeNas server with 12TB raw, 8TB after RAIDZ2. This also runs a Plex server so has a quad core for transcoding. Mainly has media files and music but also stores documents and backups of VM's.

ESXi host (32GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, i5) with several VM's including the HTPC (this is mainly a web browsing machine with a Plex client to access the media). Main uses for the VMs are General access VM, Minecraft servers, TeamSpeak server, web server, general lab work.
 
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Dell R710 - 8gb ram , duel xenon 2.25ghz, jbod of ssds and 15k drives. (ESXI 5.5.0)
server 2012 - home AD , exchange ( i do private consulting)
server 2008 - hold 4 websites on it for clients
windows 8.1 - Torrent machine - plex server
 
As you mentioned a HTPC, I used to have an all-in-one HTPC/Server. Problem was whenever Media Centre became too unstable and needed a Windows reinstall, I had to install Sabnzb, Sickbeared etc again which wasn't fun.

So I moved all the server roles to a dedicated low power server running Hyper-V which now hosts a number a VMs running AD, DHCP, DFS, WDS, Sabnzb, uTorrent etc.

If the HTPC is going to be your main source for TV then it's a best to keep the sever roles separate as any downtime on the servers doesn't affect the family's viewing.
 
I run WHS 2012 on a 60gb ssd. Cant remember what drives are in but I think its a 2,3,4tbs. I run a VM called tretflix which is a very simple way to get sabnzb/sickbeard/couchpotato/torrent all installed and isolated in a VM that is run via VMware player.
 
meandu229 said:
I run WHS 2012 on a 60gb ssd. Cant remember what drives are in but I think its a 2,3,4tbs. I run a VM called tretflix which is a very simple way to get sabnzb/sickbeard/couchpotato/torrent all installed and isolated in a VM that is run via VMware player.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the recommending tretflix :)
 
I have a M-ATX build, with an i7 4790K, 32GB DDR3, 250GB SSD for System and VMs, and 3 x 6TB Reds for data.

Server 2012 R2 is on the bare metal running Hyper-V, Files (Drive Pool on the Reds), and Plex.

Hyper-V VMs include:

- 2012 R2 Domain Controller.
- 2012 R2 Exchange 2013.
- Ubuntu Web Server.
- Ubuntu Open-VPN Server.

More than happy with the performance so far, and I have plenty of room to expand.
 
I have a few different vm's running on an old ESXi box:

2012 DC

2008 r2 RDS (Serviio & seedbox)

Solaris 11 Oracle Secure Global Desktop server (SSL VPN)

Debian OwnCloud server
 
Hellsmk2 said:
I have a few different vm's running on an old ESXi box:

2012 DC

2008 r2 RDS (Serviio & seedbox)

Solaris 11 Oracle Secure Global Desktop server (SSL VPN)

Debian OwnCloud server
Click to expand...

Hi mate, do you access your owncloud from outside you lan? if so how easy was it to setup?
 
Ok sounds fairly straight forward, do you not have to edit any of the config files? Did you set this up with wamp or something similar?
 
Got a self-built AM1 5350 system with 8GB Ram, 64GB SSD and 3x3TB drives. It runs Debian headless with ZFS to pool the 3TB drives.

Runs tvheadend for TV recording, minidlna for media serving, hosts my website and email, runs sabnzbdplus and couchpotato.
 
I've got an own built i5 2500k with 8Gb of RAM.

The server runs windows home server 2011 and is fitted with a quad tuner DVB-S2 card to serve the house with Sky to the htpcs, laptops, tablets and phones (Via DVBLink).
I use mediabrowser to serve media to the various devices connected to the LAN

I've got an assortments of drives split over 3 stablebit pools, Data, Media and Backups.

Important stuff is duplicated on the server, backups are duplicated using Crashplan and very important stuff is duplicated again to a NAS in a hidden location in the house. Off site backups are next on the list.

Also running on the server is www.domoticz.com to provide home automatition via a Z Wave network.

Finally I'm running my birdbox camera (www.bird-cam.co.uk) although it's only availably internally at the moment as I switched out the birdbox and capture cards.

Oh and of course Sabnzb and Sickbeared
 
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