I should show this thread to my wife! She thinks I already have too much! LOL
E3-1270v2 = Game server for the kids. Rotates through whatever is popular at the time.
E3-1230v2 = NextCloud and backups.
Dual 5420 = Dev Server
The room is nice and warm during the winter, cool from open windows all summer long.
Some of these pics, I can hear the hummmmm of fans! …no heater required for the winter, huh? LOL
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Figured I’d bump this again since we have a few more folks hanging around here this weekend.
“New” hardware: put my old i7/32GB desktop to work as a Proxmox node. Also got a little i3 box for pfSense because the Edgerouter X wasn’t cutting it.
Proxmox node currently has VMs for:
- unifi controller
- “NAS” (Samba shares + Syncthing)
- phpIPAM (tracking my internal + external addressing on colo/dedis)
- dokuwiki for network/server documentation
- dev/“build” server for WP → static sites
- backups (rsync pulls from externally hosted servers)
Stuff I haven’t gotten around to yet (open to suggestions):
- Wallabag or some other Pocket-style app for saving articles
- Some sort of IMAP backup system for my misc email accounts
- Basic ping/service/SSL cert monitoring (like a self-hosted uptimerobot)
- Domain name monitoring (expiration monitor for my domains + domains I want to snag)
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I have a Synology NAS and just use their Mail Server app. Since the Synology’s behind the router, it’s LAN only and perfect for an archive that I can copy emails to while looking like any old IMAP server to mail applications (so I can search emails when connected to my LAN via OpenVPN). I think it uses dovecot, so a dovecot docker container (or dovecot itself) might be just as good.
I was wondering how well a VM works as a file server. I thought VMs with large disks didn’t perform very well.
I’m currently running CentOS mostly as a Samba server and Kimchi as GUI to manage some VMs, but I would like to wipe this server and install XCP-ng instead. My main deterrent at the moment is how well Samba will perform running as a VM.
This looks an interesting project which I’d not heard of, cheers.
Yes, it’s a very lightweight webGUI that uses libvirt to manage VMs. The project was sponsored by IBM but it was dropped in 2017 and neglected for a while, but has recently been picked back up by one of the former IBM developers.
If you just need something simple to install on top of your distribution and manage a few VMs it’s a nice solution.
If you want to give it a try, I would wait for the next version because it seems a few things have broken over time because of dependencies. Specially on more up-to-date distros like Ubuntu and Fedora.
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Works fine for me, but I don’t have a ton of data on there. Maybe 600GB on a 2TB-ish disk on my ZFS array. My Plex server (colo) has an 18TB disk image with about 9.5 used and it’s holding up alright - also ZFS-backed though.
That the unifi edgerouter? I’m running a USG at the moment and I do miss the flexibility of xSense (I switched between pf and Open). In the main I love the USG but the provisioning when you make a change is a pita and if I ever get better internet (100Mbps +) I’ll have to change it.
Ubiquiti yeah, but not as user friendly as the Unifi lineup. I wanted the upgrade for some VPN routing stuff and my site-to-site tunnels (to internal networks on colo boxes). After the switch my single threaded download speed doubled, hardware wasn’t powerful enough to handle my 750Mbps line I guess… even with the hardware offloading.
750Mbps?!? Wow…
You mentioned ZFS-backed. Are those running on Proxmox?
Yep, mentioned twice in my original post 
Home server has a few drives running in a RAID (z)10.
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Sorry. I missed that. 
Anyone running VMs on SSD arrays on their home servers? Which SSD models are you guys using and which layout (RAID10, ZFS Z1, etc)?
I’m running the file server on 4 x 4TB in RAID5 but some of the VMs struggle a bit to run on this array. I’m considering some SSDs if they come on offer on Black Friday. The 1TB 860 EVO was on offer recently at Amazon and I was wondering if 4 of them on RAID10 would be a good fit.
I have 2x 240Gb SSDs (crucial BX500s) in raid 1 in my HP microserver, I am using the onboard (and incredibly shit) B120i. I just use them for the OS disks of my VMs. Works perfectly for what I need.
I then have 4x 3Tb SATA drives in RAID 5 for the file server data etc
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Forget home server, I’ve got 1TB 860 EVOs in production… lol.
Would recommend Samsungs (just not the new QVO shit), check ebay first though if you don’t mind used drives. Can find some Intel & Samsung enterprise SSDs (super high endurance) for less than or about the same as new consumer drives.
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Maybe it’s just my ignorance, but given SSDs lower lifespan compared to traditional HDDs I don’t feel very confident buying used drives. On the other hand I have no problem buying used enterprise SAS HDDs on eBay. 
I’m usually fine buying used SSDs, depending on how much data has been written to them etc. If that information isn’t available, then I’ll usually look for something else.
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Looking forward to play with a 3900x.
Does anyone have it?
Lack of stock makes it be at a ridiculous price.
Places like Unix Surplus have been really good for used drives. They had 800GB Intel DC SSDs with like… 13PB of write endurance for $130. I also got an 800GB P3700 NVMe for $199 and it had like 30TB of writes on a drive that has ~15PB of write endurance.
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