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Building a home server. Please help, DC!
40hz:
100Mbps is unusable
-lotusrootstarch (September 04, 2011, 09:11 AM)
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Except in the USA where most connections to your ISP don't even get to use all of that.
Ain't leaving something as important as your Internet connection completely at the mercy of private corporate interests a grand thing? The competition was supposed to make things better. Instead it resulted in higher prices and less bandwidth than what's found in many other industrialized nations. And lets not even talk about the joke the US cellphone system has rapidly become.
40hz:
In fact - do this. You already have a really beefy machine, right? Use VMware and build your servers as virtual servers. Build bunches of them if you want, they are only software, so you can create and destroy VM's as often as needed. Create specialized ones and general purpose ones. Create machines that work with alternative solutions. Once you have everything working the way you want using test files and test data (you can add data storage later to do the same thing over and over again) sit back and see how it was done. Determine the relative performance of each option. Did it require certain server software? Did it require multiple machines that specialized in specific tasks? Was it flaky and temperamental? If the answers here are generally yes, then a server may well be the way to go. But if you want simple elegance and set and forget features, you will likely find better, more refined answers on a workstation where everything runs in one box with a single client OS (or a consumer grade Home Server if you prefer). Regardless of which answer you come up with though, the beauty of setting it all up in a hypervisor is you can then roll it up and drop the entire system pre-set onto the new box and be running in minutes using something like ESXi on the new box instead of windows.
-steeladept (September 03, 2011, 10:36 PM)
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Oh man! Brilliant! And so obvious...(40hz smacks forehead and laughs at himself for being so blind.)
Steel's suggestion above is some of the absolute best advice I've ever read here.
Steeladept!!! Come up here and take a bow! :Thmbsup:
Before you buy anything I'd definitely give virtual a try to get a better handle on how to implement this project. No need to worry about hardware right away. They'll build plenty more by the time you're ready to buy something.
Who knows? It might even end up staying in a virtual environment if it works for you. :)
lotusrootstarch:
100Mbps is unusable
-lotusrootstarch (September 04, 2011, 09:11 AM)
--- End quote ---
Except in the USA where most connections to your ISP don't even get to use all of that.
Ain't leaving something as important as your Internet connection completely at the mercy of private corporate interests a grand thing? The competition was supposed to make things better. Instead it resulted in higher prices and less bandwidth than what's found in many other industrialized nations. And lets not even talk about the joke the US cellphone system has rapidly become.
-40hz (September 04, 2011, 12:14 PM)
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I was talking about using 100Mbps link for LAN sharing. :D
lotusrootstarch:
Steel's suggestion above is some of the absolute best advice I've ever read here.
-40hz (September 04, 2011, 12:28 PM)
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A few things to consider when going for an ESXi server configuration for purposes beyond file storage, esp. in the multimedia area:
1. Performance tends to be a hit or miss
In addition to the overhead caused by virtualization, Disk IO/RAM/CPU resource allocation/throttling can majorly affect your experience under load.
2. Free version of ESXi hypervisor enforces limitation on hardware utilization
3. Graphic card accelerated computing is not supported (not even on the roadmap iiuc)
Essential for transcoding large 1080p videos (a lot of online benchmark reports suggest that the performance difference is staggering without CUDA/DXVA)
4. The yet unproven capability/performance of USB 3.0 pass-through (to guest VM) in ESXi vSphere 5.0
I don't assume that you'll have a Blu-ray built-in on the server. To work around this, an external USB 3.0 Blu-ray reader/burner attaching to a USB port on the server is likely needed. For guest VM to access this device, you have to create a mapping that pass-through this device to the guest VM. USB 3.0 support is only just recently introduced in vSphere 5.0 and I haven't got time to test it out.
P.S. Blu-ray and USB 2.0 do not go together, at 2x speed you may wait half a day to just burn a single disc, and any other intensive IO operation during the burning process may cause it to fail.
Update:
It's no go. See: http://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/virtual-insider/2011/07/vsphere-5-top-10-vm-capabilities.aspx
"it is limited to USB devices that are connected to the machine on which you are using the vSphere client or web client. So, you still cannot connect a USB in the ESXi server and pass it through."
Creating/deleting VMs in a lab does not give you much indication of limitations mentioned above until you run into problems in real world production environment. ;)
superboyac:
OK, I'm now backtracking big time. I'm going to nix the whole server thing right now. The fundamental need here is just massive amounts of storage. I found the xbmc forum discussions about this stuff, and I was very happy to find out that a lot of people have already gone around this wheel already.
There's an OS out there made specifically for this sort of thing, called unRAID. That seems to be what most of the xbmc guys are using, with a Norco box. I'll take that, connect it to my router, and manage it from my current desktop. And it's pretty cheap, won't cost me more than $1500 (minus the drives). So I'm going to settle on that.
My business will soon be changing locations anyway, this server thing is too confusing for me right now to deal with. I just want the storage right now.
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