Seeking Ideas for New Home Network Setup (servers, not the network itself)
by ember1205 from LinuxQuestions.org on (#4YRX5)
Admins/Mods: Please move to more appropriate forum if this is not the best place.
I have quite a bit of hands-on experience in the realm of networking (home and Enterprise) and Linux systems dating back into the mid-90's. I'm comfortable and capable, but I know that there is a lot that I don't know and am seeking input from folks here that maybe have done or seen similar setups to what I going for to give me some ideas.
I have a couple of HP Z800 workstations that are pretty decked out with CPU's (one is dual quad core the other is dual hexa core, one has 48GB RAM and the other is maxed at 96GB RAM) as well as a couple of HP Envy 700 desktops and few other "ancillary" machines. Everything runs some form of Linux with the two Z800's currently running VMware and XenServer for virtualization. Everything else runs openSUSE.
I have a hefty Plex setup with media spread across four 6TB hard drives contained in two different machines (one is the Plex server and the other is a "NAS"). My virtualization guests include a couple of Windows10 instances and a variety of openSUSE systems that do things like DNS, DHCP, media transcoding (after I rip new BluRay discs, I pass them through a transcoder to reduce file size), and even acting as a bridge between my Echo devices and my ZWave Home Automation controller so that I can voice control my smart home. There's quite a bit of "stuff" going on and it took my years and years of slow progression to get to where I am right now.
I'm looking to make some real improvements and stepping up the overall resilience of my setup. Step one will be to build something that I can actually believe is more like a NAS than just a server using NFS to export some disks. I have -never- been a fan of FreeNAS for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the forums are filled with overly-opinionated people that "RAM shame" you if you are unable or unwilling to run FreeNAS on an expensive machine with ECC RAM in it. While I understand where many of their points are rooted, I feel it is an unreasonably high requirement to run Enterprise-Class hardware at home for the purposes of what I seek to do. Is my digital content important? Yes. Does it need the kind of protection that FreeNAS users "insist" I design into it? No, it does not. My content is largely static, and I maintain a duplication copy of everything to protect against a full-on site failure (not just a drive outage).
One of the things that I've wondered about is whether I could stack some large drives into the Z800, spin up XenServer / VMware / whatever, then build a guest instance on top of the host to be the 'brain' of my NAS environment to share out content from the installed HD's. I know that I could do this by creating storage instances on the drives, but what if I just wanted to leave them formatted as EXT3/EXT4? Does a guest instance have the ability to mount a local, physical drive directly?
What are some of the other things for me to consider to optimize my environment and get the most out of it?
For reference, my Plex environment has a lot of ripped movies, TV Series that I have ripped from DVD, TV Series that I have recorded with my HD antenna setup, and weekly serial shows that I record and delete after I have watched them. This last part is the most dynamic area of digital media for me as I store recently recorded shows and movies and then delete the files after they've been watched.
I'll also add that I am preparing to build out a MythTV setup with a backend and frontends for the TV piece at least because I'm sick and tired of the crappiness of Plex. This doesn't really change much except that I may be running the Plex environment and the MythTV backend on the same system for a while until I'm ready to kick Plex to the curb.
Yeah, I know... It's a lot of info. Any thoughts on starting points around the NAS piece and other chunks to potentially tackle "afterward" are welcome.
I have quite a bit of hands-on experience in the realm of networking (home and Enterprise) and Linux systems dating back into the mid-90's. I'm comfortable and capable, but I know that there is a lot that I don't know and am seeking input from folks here that maybe have done or seen similar setups to what I going for to give me some ideas.
I have a couple of HP Z800 workstations that are pretty decked out with CPU's (one is dual quad core the other is dual hexa core, one has 48GB RAM and the other is maxed at 96GB RAM) as well as a couple of HP Envy 700 desktops and few other "ancillary" machines. Everything runs some form of Linux with the two Z800's currently running VMware and XenServer for virtualization. Everything else runs openSUSE.
I have a hefty Plex setup with media spread across four 6TB hard drives contained in two different machines (one is the Plex server and the other is a "NAS"). My virtualization guests include a couple of Windows10 instances and a variety of openSUSE systems that do things like DNS, DHCP, media transcoding (after I rip new BluRay discs, I pass them through a transcoder to reduce file size), and even acting as a bridge between my Echo devices and my ZWave Home Automation controller so that I can voice control my smart home. There's quite a bit of "stuff" going on and it took my years and years of slow progression to get to where I am right now.
I'm looking to make some real improvements and stepping up the overall resilience of my setup. Step one will be to build something that I can actually believe is more like a NAS than just a server using NFS to export some disks. I have -never- been a fan of FreeNAS for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the forums are filled with overly-opinionated people that "RAM shame" you if you are unable or unwilling to run FreeNAS on an expensive machine with ECC RAM in it. While I understand where many of their points are rooted, I feel it is an unreasonably high requirement to run Enterprise-Class hardware at home for the purposes of what I seek to do. Is my digital content important? Yes. Does it need the kind of protection that FreeNAS users "insist" I design into it? No, it does not. My content is largely static, and I maintain a duplication copy of everything to protect against a full-on site failure (not just a drive outage).
One of the things that I've wondered about is whether I could stack some large drives into the Z800, spin up XenServer / VMware / whatever, then build a guest instance on top of the host to be the 'brain' of my NAS environment to share out content from the installed HD's. I know that I could do this by creating storage instances on the drives, but what if I just wanted to leave them formatted as EXT3/EXT4? Does a guest instance have the ability to mount a local, physical drive directly?
What are some of the other things for me to consider to optimize my environment and get the most out of it?
For reference, my Plex environment has a lot of ripped movies, TV Series that I have ripped from DVD, TV Series that I have recorded with my HD antenna setup, and weekly serial shows that I record and delete after I have watched them. This last part is the most dynamic area of digital media for me as I store recently recorded shows and movies and then delete the files after they've been watched.
I'll also add that I am preparing to build out a MythTV setup with a backend and frontends for the TV piece at least because I'm sick and tired of the crappiness of Plex. This doesn't really change much except that I may be running the Plex environment and the MythTV backend on the same system for a while until I'm ready to kick Plex to the curb.
Yeah, I know... It's a lot of info. Any thoughts on starting points around the NAS piece and other chunks to potentially tackle "afterward" are welcome.