Experience
I mentioned three goals for this project in the beginning, and I want to revisit them here to see just how successful I have been thus far. I knew going in that I would most likely be successful with regards to each goal, but sometimes you don’t know just how well your ideas on paper will translate into the real world.
Consolidation – This goal was pretty straightforward. I was able to retire three individual systems, each one not really ideal for their task at hand, mostly due to age. By removing three systems and replacing them with the new server, I was able to reduce my power cables from three to one, and network cables from three to one. Now, one might say that I actually lost out on overall bandwidth available to my server environment, and that is technically true, but it was very rare that any of the single systems was using its full available throughput. Overall Result – Success.
Flexibility – This was one of the goals where I expected to see the largest improvement, and I have already experienced it multiple times in the month or so that I have been using this new setup. When performing the physical to virtual conversions, I was able to make changes to the available resources to each of the new virtual servers that I just couldn’t perform with their old physical setups. For example, I had the option to provide each system more CPU cores and more Memory by simply making changes to the VM configuration. In their physical embodiments, that would have required swapping hardware to achieve. Now it is as simple as powering off the virtual machine, adjusting the core count or memory capacity, and restarting. The same thing goes for disk space. I can easily add additional disk space to the virtual machines, and I have the flexibility to choose what tier that storage needs to be, again, with much more ease than their previous physical configurations.
Another example of where the new flexibility came into realization was when adding more storage capacity to my Unraid server. My initial configuration provided it with two 2TB virtual disks, but I later decided I wanted a bit more capacity and redundancy, so I simply provisioned another virtual disk and voila, it was available in the Unraid interface. I was also able to easily add a cache disk to that same server, but this time I utilized the NVMe storage option provided by the virtual server. Overall Result – Success
Improved Performance – This goal is a bit harder to quantify outside of running synthetic benchmarks to create graphs and tables. But that isn’t what I am after. I’m looking for snappier feeling Windows environments, quicker Plex library navigation, playback, and transcoding headroom. I want to see faster load ins on my Minecraft server, and a reduction or complete removal of stutters and chunk loading. About a month into this configuration, and I can say that all of these improvements have been realized. It is these improvements to the user experience that I was really looking forward to experiencing. The removal of a sluggish experience from all aspects of my home server environment has been awesome, and I’m wishing I would have made this change sooner. Overall Result – Success
Future Improvements
Is my new server setup perfect? Absolutely not. But then again, perfection wasn’t the point of this exercise. The point was to utilize some retired hardware to improve my home server setup, while achieving some specific goals along the way. There are really only two aspects of this new server build that I would like to improve in the somewhat near future, and one additional upgrade later on. The single-port Intel gigabit NIC is a bit of a bottleneck with regards to moving data in and out of the server, and that has to change. Like I mentioned earlier, I will be looking to move to a multi-port 1Gbps NIC or a multi-gig NIC to provide ample bandwidth to the server as its roles expand and I utilize its ample hardware more in the future. Unfortunately, to move to a multi-gig NIC would require me to procure a multi-gig switch, but I have been looking to make this move anyways.
Additionally, I would like to upgrade the NVMe storage from the two 512GB Gen3 NVMe SSDs to larger Gen4 drives. My current train of thought would be to replace them with 4TB drives, for a total of 8TB of Tier 1 storage. This should provide me with plenty of space for not only OS virtual disks, but would allow me to move some data storage from the slower HDD-based tier to much faster SSDs.
The third upgrade to the new server is probably a long way off, but I would like to replace the 6TB HDDs with high-capacity SSDs. These drives have really come down in price recently, but once you start getting above the 4TB mark, the prices just don’t make sense yet for me.
Final Thoughts
I think this server upgrade project has been a huge success thus far, and this system has the potential to be a long-standing member of my overall home network setup. The improvement to overall system responsiveness, the flexibility to make changes to the environment with simple tweaks to virtual machines, and the cleaner physical footprint have all contributed to that success. If you have the need or desire to upgrade or create a home server, it is definitely worth considering consolidating where you can, and utilizing retired or used hardware to create a robust environment to host services and data with the flexibility needs you might have. There are a ton of great options out there for all aspects of the build hardware and software, so the world is your oyster if you want it to be. As for me, I’m off to try out some new home automation solutions, and after that I’m testing out some self-hosted options within my Unraid virtual machine.
