There are a few computers in our house. I have a PC on my desk. I have another PC connected to the TV which we use for watching and recording TV, films, music, and playing games. I have a netbook in the bedroom for those days when I can’t get out of bed, and an Android phone which I use for music and video too. My wife has a laptop and an Android tablet computer.Keeping track of our files on all of that can be a bit chaotic and so I have an old PC which works as a file server - a central repository for all of our music and video files which all of the other devices can fetch files from.
That file server consists of an old under-powered PC which runs FreeNAS and has a couple of not-quite-worn-out laptop disks in it because those were all that I had. Since this server isn’t very fast or reliable, Last week I bought a 2TB hard disk to replace the dying disks. I also had an email from ebuyer (my normal source of computer parts) which featured a HP Microserver for £229 with an offer of £100 cashback from HP. A new server capable of running four disks with low power consumption and a warranty all for £129 seemed like a fantastic deal to me, so yesterday I bought one. (It had gone up by £10 though.) The server came with a 250GB hard disk which is a bonus since hard disks are still very expensive after flooding in Thailand destroyed several factories recently.
I intend to use the new server to hold all our music and video as before, plus our photographs. I will store all my files and documents on it, and I will backup the other computers to it. Now that I have my new server I have to work out what operating system I am going to run on it. My old server has FreeNAS installed onto a 2GB USB memory stick, and the hard disks are formatted with ZFS for high file integrity. I could do the same with my new server but since the new server is a bit more powerful (Dual-core CPU, 6GB RAM) I want to also run a couple of Linux virtual machines on it and I can’t easily run virtual machines with FreeNAS as the host operating system. I don’t want to run a file server from a virtual disk either, to avoid any data loss. Oracle Solaris has ZFS so I could run that on the new server and then run VirtualBox on that to host my Linux VMs. Another option is to run a bare metal hypervisor like VMWare ESXi or Citrix Xenserver, and then run Linux and FreeNAS as clients under that. I still wouldn’t want to serve my files from a virtual disk but I could give the FreeNAS virtual machine direct access to the 2TB hard disk. The only question then is where the virtual machines reside. I would prefer not to use the 250GB disk as that would be a welcome upgrade in my Media Centre PC which currently has a horrifically slow IDE disk which struggles to record two programmes at once. I could possibly host the virtual machine for FreeNAS on a USB memory stick too, maybe even the same one as ESXi is installed on although I don’t know if that can be done. I am curious as to whether ESXi could load a second virtual machine through an iSCSI drive served up by another one of it’s clients but that does seem like a recipe for slow operation and data loss.
Comments on which way to go are welcome.