Alright, this may be a bit of a loaded question. But I figured it may provide good insight to both myself and to others. I just came into a pretty beefy server - dual Xeon E5 2699 v3’s (18 cores each), 768 gigs of RAM. Ten front drive bays, 6 of which have 7.68T NVMes and 4 of which have 15.36T SAS drives. I’m thinking the NVMe drives will go into a single RAID 5 or 6 (thoughts?), and the 15360s I plan to use for more sensitive stuff so I’m planning dual RAID 1’s there. Boot drives will be a hardware RAID 1 of dual 1920G SATA SSDs. So again… pretty beefy. I believe this server would cost me ~$100/month to run, although I may try something where I keep it off 6/7 days of the week and only turn it on if I need it otherwise, I’m not sure yet. Thoughts on that are welcome too.
All of that said. I’ve got the power & the storage for some pretty neat projects. But I’ve not delved into anything of this nature before. I’ve heard of Plex, I’ve heard of Jellyfin, but I don’t really know what it all means past that. And I think it would be pretty neat to be able to dump some streaming service subscriptions and make up for a bit of the coin I’d be dumping to power this thing (may also host a Minecraft server with it, lol).
I’m very familiar with Linux/console, so that’s not really an issue. I’m erring towards either Arch or Ubuntu (fight me, I like both).
Thoughts? Ideas? I figured this was a good community to post this in but can remove if it isn’t.
Unraid is a wonderful OS that will let you explore the world of containerized applications and however many VMs you feel like configuring. Spin up and spin down whatever as you please. Terraria. Valheim. Starbound. CounterStrike.
First thing, though: you’re going to want your whole goddamn network hooked through that thing. Run CAT 6. Do it right. Buy a Uninterruptible Power Supply that can keep that server humming through the first 10 minutes of a blackout (to gracefully shut down).
Time to look at things like Tailscale, Pihole, Plex. If you’re going to run Minecraft then Google “Paper MC”. You can replace Google Docs with nextcloud. Play D&D? It’s Foundry time. Roll your own Lemmy. Roll your own Mastodon. (Back up your volumes.) Host your own website. Host other people’s websites. (Back up your volumes elsewhere.)
All the people in the selfhosting and homelab communities will tell you what to do with that beef.
The biggest reason I personally use and would recommend Unraid is it simplifies everything, specifically around docker.
Deploying docker containers? There are community apps where people have set up scripts so all you have to do is fill in the blanks for your set up and bam, your container is deployed and running.
Managing you can add your own items and fill in your own blanks, or change them and it’ll deploy and remove the old container.
I’ve used portainer, compose, and looked into runtipi for docker management, and tried out windows server, Ubuntu, proxmox, truenas for HV/VE/OS, and while they all had bits I liked they all lacked something, and unraid had it all or a way to have it.
The initial reason was ragged arrays for why I chose it ever the others, but now I like its simplicity, and don’t find myself wanting for more control over anything.
Yes, for someone with limited Linux experience, Unraid is a better choice than Proxmox. And, the experience gained through configuring Unraid will be applicable should you want to move to Proxmox later.
Ragged arrays was also why I chose Unraid. They initially didn’t have
docker-composesupport, you had to jam it in the boot script! Now, they have that very nice Docker management dashboard that I completely bypass because I prefer the CLI.Honestly would much rather recommend Fabric unless you’re looking to host a large scale public server. Serverside optimization mods like Lithium and Starlight are great and preserve the vanilla gameplay unlike Paper which breaks or disables a lot of mechanics by default.
That’s solid advice. If your Minecraft plan is for personal or small group use, Fabric is probably the better call.
I wish I could run CAT6, but I rent ! But someday, for sure. Internet speed is absolutely going to be my biggest bottleneck here. But Unraid is a great idea. And somehow, I never even thought of hosting my own website… that’s definitely one of the many moves here. Thanks!
Meh just do what I did and run it in the floor. Get the right color and some tape hah
Would recommend looking at crafty controller for hosting a minecraft server.