Server built, time to set it up..

It's the 'ours' box in my sig. I'm leaning heavily towards Win 2016 Datacenter and Hyper-V rather than ESXi, simply because I have a free license and already know VMware well enough. The system will be for data duplication/backup from our other systems, as well as running Blue Iris and providing IP services to my camera network. I'm hoping to have one port of the Intel NIC connected to the PoE switch, and the other port going to my router. The idea is that you wouldn't be able to access the cameras directly from the main home network, only through the web portal presented by Blue Iris. I think I want to use the Server 2016 Web Application proxy with an outside port on the router NATted over to that sytem.. I think? Definitely not looking to set up a whole VPN, I know that much.

I think I'm going to let Windows manage the drives with a double parity setup. I think. I was originally going to use Nas4Free, but after reading good things about REFSv2, I figure why not give it a shot? I plan on letting the top level/host Windows install manage the storage, making new virtual disks for VM use as needed, setting up the actual VMs on the 960 Evo. As present, I'll just have one guest OS install, for Blue Iris. The data duplication/backup services, I'm not sure. Set up an iSCSI target? Use Windows shares? I'm really not sure which way to go on this. I want to set it up so that my other PCs can send data backups and incremental backups to the server, but cannot wipe or overwrite them after they are sent - in case of malware, of course.

We use mostly Ubuntu systems at work, so I have almost no Windows server experience. If it sounds like I'm clueless, it's because I am actually clueless. I'd really appreciate any pointers on configuring the server, accounts, best practices, security, NIC config, DHCP (I think I want the server to provide DHCP for stuff on the PoE switch and also to route between the two ports on the NIC if that's something Windows can do), and anything else I've forgotten to mention. I would like to leverage Windows Server 2016 as much as I can, since I'm doing this as much for the learning experience as for anything else, so kindly refrain from suggestions along the lines of 'use linux instead.'

I greatly appreciate any input

I'm pretty bummed with how this system is working out so far. There are no Server 2016 drivers that I can find for the AM4 chipset and RAID. The Windows 10 RAID drivers from Asus refuse to install. Samsung NVME drivers refuse to install. I could live with suboptimal boot drive performance, but Windows won't recognize the RAID 10 array I made in BIOS. I guess I could get a dedicated RAID card...

New plan: proxmox KVM to manage the VMs, one of which will be Freenas with the hard drives passed through and another which will be some flavor of desktop Windows to run the Blue Iris stuff. So, so done with trying to make Ryzen work with Windows Server 2016. It's just not there yet.

What's the cost of your setup you are hitting close to what I was wanting to do. What is the sound like? I'm wanting to make one baseically the size of a receiver and quiet so it can sit on a shelf. A desktop style setup.

Err, I dunno what the sound is like, this is a dedicated server, it won't have speakers or a monitor hooked up.

I think FT is referring to how loud is the server versus the sound quality of audio (but could be wrong).

ratbuddy said:

Err, I dunno what the sound is like, this is a dedicated server, it won't have speakers or a monitor hooked up.

Click to expand...

Lol sorry I meant if the system was loud fan noise wise. I just bought a Skull Canyon which I think will save me a lot of issues

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. It's dead silent. I accidentally picked a case meant for watercooling (just grabbed the cheapest Silverstone with enough drive bays) so it's nice and roomy with a vented top. I'll probably add a second fan in front to keep the drives cool, but I don't think it's really necessary, even with all six bays full.

OK, I can speak more intelligently about noise now. The lower three hard drives were getting rather warm, so I replaced the front 120mm fan with a pair of 140mm Noctua PWM fans. I moved the 120mm to the back of the case. The Noctuas are on a splitter running off the same mobo port, and the BIOS has decent fan controls - I set them for ~1500rpm. You can tell the system is running now, but the sound is not harsh at all. You can barely hear them at 5 feet, and not at all at 10 feet. The drives are nice and cool.

I have it set up with Proxmox running on bare metal, freenas in a vm, and all 6 SATA drives passed through to the freenas VM which has them set up in RAIDz2. A Windows server 2016 VM is able to access the freenas just fine, and I still have a bunch of cores and about 32GB of RAM to play with. Proxmox gripe: it only lets you pass through a maximum of 6 SATA devices per guest OS. Still, it's working better then Server 2016 was. The web panel is great, and I also installed a desktop thingy just in case, fcxe4 or something like that.

Next step: move the machine to a closet and get some network wiring done..