What do you use your home server for?

[nails666]

Hi, having convinced myself that I really need to get a little home server (probably an HP microserver running WHS2011) I now need to decide what I'm actually going to do with it.

I currently have a D-Link DNS320 NAS that isn't great so the server will start by taking over basic fileserving duties plus backups and media streaming to my other pc's and PS3. After that I might look at an ftp server and possibly some video downloading stuff like Sickbeard and Couchpotato. Beyond those obvious basics I'm not really sure what else to try so I'm looking for inspiration.

So what serious/useful/fun/pointless but cool things have you all got your servers doing?

Thanks,

Ross

 

[nails666]

Hmm, some fairly serious usage there then. I've only dabbed extremely briefly with VMs at work so don't really know where to start with them. From looking around I do see a lot of usage of them on the microservers. Might be something to look into to get somewhere to practice using linux, something I've never quite got around to doing.

Thanks for the thoughts.

 

[nails666]

Nice, thanks everyone for all the info, plenty of good stuff there.

I have to admit I'm tempted by the ESXi approach but I think for my current experience level and the fact that I need to get the basic functions working solidly I'll go for a WHS2011 install. From there I can add some VM stuff later as I get more adventurous.

That Pfsense! looks very interesting, I could definitely see advantages to having the server act as my main router for the network. Would it be possible to run that from a VM running within WHS or is there some equivalent type software that could be run natively in windows?

As a general question on the microservers, is there much advantage going for an SSD as the main OS drive (assuming WHS) over the basic 250gb drive supplied with the server for the type of operations I've mentioned?

TIA,

Ross

 

[nails666]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

So it seems that running some form of virtualisation is a very common usage with a lot of people going for ESXi as the method.
Now my knowledge of VM stuff is extremely basic so I've got a few questions about it all before I decide how to setup my server.

For running VM's there seems to be 2 main approaches mentioned on here, using ESXi as the host and running all VM's from that or running an actual OS (eg some flavour of windows) as host and then running some VM package within that? What are the main advantages/disadvantages of these methods? I'm guessing the ESXi approach is 'cleaner' but what are the differences in performance, ease of use, device compatability, security, backups, portability, cost etc?

If you go the installed OS as host route would it possible in future to somehow convert your OS install into a VM to run within ESXi or indeed the other way around, take an ESXi VM and make that the installed OS without losing setup? I'm thinking here mainly about if I go one route and after a while want to change to the other how easy will that be without having to re-setup what I've done so far.

TIA,

Ross

 

[nails666]

Sounds like a fun setup Cycrow, I'd love to build something like that just for fun but I can't imagine what on earth I could actually use it all for