Hello all,
I've been using my personal everyday use PC as a server (kill me ) which has lots of disadvantages and am looking to build a dedicated server but I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out which OS to choose, through reading and researching and asking around I was led to ESXi. Before continuing I will lay out my current server and what I'm planning to do with it.
I have my normal (gaming) PC with an additional LSI 9261-8i RAID card which has 7 3TB HDDs connected to it in RAID6 and a 4xGbE NIC. Obviously I want these transferred to the new server case.
As for the services i'm running in my server, I'm running a media server, an application server, FTP server, VPN, couple of online games server, VoIP server, torrent server.
Now here is what I'm struggling with. I'm very familiar with windows 7 while being a complete noob with other OSs. I've heard about FreeNAS and I gave it a try on a virtual machine and I liked it, specially the ZFS features. Anyways I can't say i'm too familiar with it and am afraid to screw things up and lose 15TB+ of data. So here is my question.
What exactly is ESXi? from what I read it is a virtual OS that allows you to setup multiple OSs and run hardware as a pass-through. So, can I install both Win7 and FreeNAS and run them together simultaneously from the server machine? Since I want to setup my services and applications in w7 and manage my storage with FreeNAS. Does it work that way? Please guide me
Thanks.
*** Edited ***
The reason I want to run on a pass-through virtual OS is that i'm planning to switch to software RAID where ZFS in FreeNAS can control my HDDs directly.
***************
I've been using my personal everyday use PC as a server (kill me ) which has lots of disadvantages and am looking to build a dedicated server but I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out which OS to choose, through reading and researching and asking around I was led to ESXi. Before continuing I will lay out my current server and what I'm planning to do with it.
I have my normal (gaming) PC with an additional LSI 9261-8i RAID card which has 7 3TB HDDs connected to it in RAID6 and a 4xGbE NIC. Obviously I want these transferred to the new server case.
As for the services i'm running in my server, I'm running a media server, an application server, FTP server, VPN, couple of online games server, VoIP server, torrent server.
Now here is what I'm struggling with. I'm very familiar with windows 7 while being a complete noob with other OSs. I've heard about FreeNAS and I gave it a try on a virtual machine and I liked it, specially the ZFS features. Anyways I can't say i'm too familiar with it and am afraid to screw things up and lose 15TB+ of data. So here is my question.
What exactly is ESXi? from what I read it is a virtual OS that allows you to setup multiple OSs and run hardware as a pass-through. So, can I install both Win7 and FreeNAS and run them together simultaneously from the server machine? Since I want to setup my services and applications in w7 and manage my storage with FreeNAS. Does it work that way? Please guide me
Thanks.
*** Edited ***
The reason I want to run on a pass-through virtual OS is that i'm planning to switch to software RAID where ZFS in FreeNAS can control my HDDs directly.
***************
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