Server thoughts - Media server + others

[jnick]

I'm looking to build myself a server that can take on a few roles. I was wondering what the best, effective method would be to tackle this task.

1. I absolutely NEED a media server/NAS. I will be using PLEX to stream my media so the absolute must is that I can use this server to centrally store my media files.

2. I NEED it to run my UniFi controller

3. I was hoping to setup a test machine or two on Win Server 2012 to gain more experience for work.

4. Any other random services to get experience with them (mail server, linux distros, etc).

In the past, I did successfully completed task #1 for a relative using Windows Home Server 2011 and Drive Pool. This worked rather well and they still use it today. However, they aren't all that tech savvy and from what I saw, WHS11 is rather dull and may not be flexible enough for my needs.

Of course I have always thought of installing 2012R2 and then use VMs for the other servers. However, the issue is, from my research, you really shouldn't virtualize any NAS based server unless you're ready to spend big money on RAID controllers with passthrough.

With that said, the one idea I had was to install 2012 R2 as the base. Install DrivePool on this so the 'NAS' server is local to the main machine. From there, I could fire up VMs, and virtualize the other services, such as another instance of 2012 R2 to tinker with and what not.

Is that the best method to go? I'm open to all suggestions. Again, the only aspect of this box that would be production is the NAS/Media Server and the UniFi Controller. Everything else would just be play boxes to learn/gain experience.

Let me know your thoughts!

 

[Schro]

I'm running my media server on Ubuntu, using ZFS for the drive array. Plex is also running on the server and works quite well. I run my Unifi controller on a windows server VM (though, not on top of the media server, but could be, if I wanted it to be).

ZFS will let you use consumer grade drives and not require big iron in the raid controller department. Pile virtualbox on top and you're good to go.

 

[jnick]

So your thought is to use ZFS for the media server/NAS with something like FreeNAS and then virtualize on top of that to install the windows VMs?

 

[Schro]

So your thought is to use ZFS for the media server/NAS with something like FreeNAS and then virtualize on top of that to install the windows VMs?

Yes, assuming you won't need lightning performance out of the VMs. I'd also run Plex on the host OS for performance reasons, but that'd also mean you'd need to have a host OS that can run both ZFS and Plex (hence why I have Ubuntu instead of OpenIndiana/Slowlaris/etc). My ultimate design is having a separate esxi box that runs off of the NAS (via iSCSI) for all of the virtual environments.

I have one VM on the NAS box right now (windows home server). It tends to run slow as molasses on VirtualBox, but it at least gets the network backups done. The VMs on the separate esxi box run far better. The Unifi app doesn't really require any horsepower, so, for that part, you'll be fine. I suspect the issue has more to do with Virtualbox than it does the underlying hardware, but since I've got esxi mostly running I haven't bothered with further tweaking.