Building a gaming server

[Banzai_Joe]

Mods, if this aint in the right place, please move accordingly, thanks.

Ok, so, my lad and his buddies wants to build and host their own gaming server.

As i have it spare, they are going to use a rig based around,
Q6600
4gb ram
1 x 60gb ssd
2 x 500gb hdd
No gfx as yet....
gbit lan card

So, they want to run a mixture of minecraft, BF3 and CoD servers. My lad has a 30mb vm cable connection.

Questions

1. Seeing as they will 'serve' the games only, does this rig need any kind of powerful gaming card?

2. What OS should they use? It will also serve as a file/ftp/web server.

3. I have a HP Proliant NL36 microserver running ws2008 r2 and hyper-v and i've virtualised WHS2011 which has worked very well for over a year. Could they use that or would a gaming server need more uuumph!

4. Could they at least use a virtual OS?

Any input would be appreciated, thanks.

 

[Banzai_Joe]

Don't know how many players tbh. They want to get it up and running anyway as a sort of project. They can deal with issues like that at the time, lol.

what about OS? I have no idea about gaming server at all. Do they need specific server OS. Or would it be enough that they have the server side code for the games they want to run...and run it on any OS?

 

[Banzai_Joe]

AS in the OP, BF3, Minecraft, CoD.

They also want to sahre their files amongst each other.