Your First HOME SERVER – What to look for?

Getting into home labbing and setting up your first home server can be an intimidating process it’s not nearly as simple as buying a regular desktop where you can just walk into your local best buy and walk out with a ready to go system in about five minutes a home

Server is often more dependent on your specific use cases are you running a game server is it going to be an ass are you looking for a low power file hosting system are you just trying to impress the ladies or maybe all the above well depending on where and who you ask you

Can get varying responses to what hardware and software you should be going with and truth is for better or for worse that oftentimes there are plenty of options to get you where you need to go so today we’re going to be talking about how to approach setting up home servers for beginners Okay let me clarify a few things first this is for beginners this is for the people who find the home server space intimidating and might be afraid to get started as they don’t want to mess up let me start by saying i was in this boat a few years ago so

Don’t worry i thought that when i started i needed special hardware to run a real home server let me know down in the comments some of the misconceptions you had when you first got into building your home server and or home lab i’d be interested to hear your stories another

Thing i want to acknowledge is that there will be no home server gatekeeping here a home server is simply a computer that serves a purpose for your needs or wants this can be a tiny little raspberry pi or a massive 64 core epic monstrosity that your girl swears is

Just a friend the people who will look down on you for running a raspberry pi or an old desktop as your home server are losers who probably poured their milk before their cereal anyway all right let’s get started with the first step and that is to decide

What is it you want this server to do don’t worry if you don’t have a clear idea or any specific use cases sometimes learning is both the journey and the destination and that’s perfectly okay for those of you who do have specific ideas like a nas media server

Web hosting or dns server that’ll make it easier to pick out hardware that aligns with those needs so let’s talk about hardware because that’s often a hot topic when it comes to home servers now like i said before pretty much any computer can be a home server assuming the software you want to

Run is supported on the hardware you decide to choose what do i mean by that well at the highest level there are two major paths you can choose from when it comes to hardware arm and x86 x86 is the platform you’re probably most familiar with which includes your intel and amd platforms

And can run like 99 of the home lab software out there so pretty common arm is going to be your power efficient cost effective platforms mainly used in mobile devices but has since branched out into more consumer and desktop products most notably the raspberry pi and as of a few years ago

The apple’s m1 chips arm while gaining popularity and can still support a massive collection of software can sometimes lead to some compatibility issues for some services so why even go with arm well like i said before for the most part it’s cheaper and uses less power which often leads to a smaller

Footprint less noise and less heat remember if you don’t need a massive nas encoding server or plan to run heavy cpu tasks then you don’t need more expensive higher end hardware those of you that want to go the x86 route let’s talk about what hardware you should be

Looking for now again keep in mind your use cases for your server when choosing the parts for the most part any intel or amd cpu can be used at the heart of your system however there are a couple of things to consider when choosing your cpu the first things you

Want to make note of are the thread count clock speed and age of the platform the more cores or threads you have the better your cpu will be at running multiple services at a time for someone just getting into home labs i’d say four cores and eight threads is a

Good starting point but you can certainly go for more or less the clock speed will determine how quickly your cpu can run each of these tasks though the clock speed isn’t everything the overall speed of a cpu is going to be determined by a combination

Of its clock speed as well as its ipc’s or instructions per cycle this often isn’t advertised which is why i mentioned to look at the age of the platform as for the most part ipc’s tend to go up as newer platforms are released this is the reason why a 4 gigahertz cpu

From like 10 years ago will absolutely get stopped by a modern cpu running at nearly half the clock speed another reason why you’ll want to look at the age of the platform is to determine memory specification pci compatibility io and especially how readily available

Parts will be i mean sure you can find a really old cheap xeon cpu with four cores but you may have trouble finding a motherboard to go with it you’ll be stuck using older ram and you’ll be without some of the modern creature comforts like usb 3.0 nvme support and

In some cases limited pcie slots now again if you don’t need any of those things and just want a cheaper system then by all means go for it in the end the only things that are truly important for choosing a cpu is to make sure it supports virtualization and unless you

Have a dedicated graphics card that it has built-in graphics more on that in a bit so whether that be an intel core i3 xeons amd ryzens phenoms or epics you can find out most of the time by just googling the cpu model and looking for virtualization support and internal

Graphics luckily most of the cpus that came out within the last seven or eight years will support virtualization so you should be good to go the other pieces of hardware graphics ram hard drives will be more dependent on what you plan to do with your server as well

As your budget so for graphics it’s often safe to assume that you need at least some kind of gpu whether that’s dedicated graphics card built into the cpu or in some cases a small gpu built into the motherboard but this is usually only the case for higher end server

Hardware you may think that you don’t need any graphics if you’re just gonna run the system headless and it’s just sitting in your closet but a lot of systems won’t even post if there’s no kind of gpu detected for ram again it’s more about what your platform

Supports and what you plan on running for beginner i’d say you can get by with about eight gigabytes but the more the better now an important thing about ram is to make sure that you’re getting the correct ram for your system if you go with a server model cpu like xeon or

Epic then you’ll be able to use ecc or error correction code ram versus regular consumer ram ecc is a huge benefit for systems that are running 24 7 as the ram is constantly being written to and read from so naturally there’s gonna be some times where there’s an error in a regular

System this is where you’d see a blue screen or a crash but with ecc ram it can often mitigate the error and continue to work this is why i push going with a system that supports ecc ram however if you already have the consumer hardware laying around and you just want

To turn it into a server i certainly wouldn’t fault you for going that route for hard drives this is probably the most dependent on your use case and will vary widely from person to person if you’re looking to set up a nas that hosts a ton of videos photos games

Recipes world domination plans then you’ll probably want a lot of hard drives keep in mind that if you go with an older platform you may be limited on how many sata or sas ports you have and you may have to purchase a dedicated hba card to increase the number of drives

Your system can support for the most part i’d recommend snagging two or three one terabyte hard drive so that you can get a decent amount of storage space and have a few drives to play around with with different raid configurations a good place to start would be with my

Budget home server video in which i show you that you can get a solid setup all for under 500 now i could go on and on about all the varying differences and nuances about choosing certain hardware over another but unless you want this video to be a full feature and length film then

We’ll have to move on because there’s a lot more stuff to cover software so you’ve got your hardware picked out and you’re ready to actually run something on it but when you look up home server operating systems you’re met with dozens of different options and everyone on the

Forums claims that x is better than y and that if you use y you’re basically an in cell but z is okay as long as you’re not running it with q let me simplify this for a second in general it does not matter which operating system you eventually go with for the

Most part every operating system can get you where you need to go for a majority of home server services whether you want to run windows 10 arch linux freebsd mac os or any dedicated hypervisor os now i’ve already done a video about setting up a home server on a windows 10 machine

Versus a basic hypervisor so i’ll link that up here and down below it’s a solid video to help you get started and i definitely recommend checking it out but let me give you the tldr here you can throw windows or a desktop version of linux onto your server and go with docker to

Run all your services and be perfectly fine you can also install something like virtualbox to spin up virtual machines from within windows so why even go with something else that sounds pretty great right well desktop systems are designed to be just that desktop operating systems yes they can

Meet your home lab needs but if you want much more flexibility with your hardware and want to run it with much less overhead then you want to go with a dedicated hypervisor operating system this is an operating system that runs on your server without a desktop environment but in most cases offers you

A dedicated web gui that is much more suited to a home lab environment including dedicated commands and sections to create vms services allocate cpu cores memory storage and even pass-through hardware directly to one of those vms now there are plenty of solid hypervisor operating systems out there

But i’m going to briefly touch on the four that i’m most familiar with proxmox unraid truenas scale and truenas core yes there are others out there that are great and i’m a total noob for not being an expert in all of them and blah blah blah blah so three of these are linux

Based which means you get access to the best way of running services with docker now docker deserves multiple videos dedicated to it but for this case just know that docker is a widely supported platform with plenty of support that runs on linux and allows you to spin up

Services with little to no overhead trueness core is freebsd based so they use jails as a way to containerize and spin up services which in a vacuum isn’t bad but when docker exists it’s kind of hard to justify going that route so i even mentioned trueness core well

Personally i think it’s the best system if you’re going to go with a dedicated nas i run trueness core in my system and it’s honestly the most stable thing in my entire home lab but wait i just talked about how linux and docker are so great why wouldn’t i run one of the

Others well i am i run proxmox as my main hypervisor os and i’ve actually created a vm in there to run trueness core it’s running a hypervisor within a hypervisor kinda like that famous movie um shrek 2. now this is a bit more advanced and i certainly wouldn’t recommend doing this

For beginners which is why i’d recommend choosing a single hypervisor and getting familiar with that first now which one should you go with well that’s a tough question and honestly there’s no right or wrong answer proxmox isn’t the most user-friendly but it’s virtualization features are top-notch unraid has an extremely inviting gooey

And lively community but it isn’t free trueness scale is extremely new but has amazing mass functionality built right in so do some research ask around flip a coin throw a dart whatever if you made me choose one to recommend for a beginner knowing nothing about what they were going to use it for

Then probably recommend to go with unread due to it being more user friendly now like i said before these hypervisors don’t have desktop environments like your traditional operating systems you’ll install these on a usb drive that you flash the iso file onto and then once they’re installed you’ll be able to access them

Directly using the cli or over your network using any browser which is pretty neat there you go you’ve got your hardware picked out you’ve got your operating system of choice up and running you’ve got all the chicks all over you at this point now what well you probably want to run

Some actual services most hypervisors come with some kind of way to host services or apps with just a few clicks in proxmox you have the lxc containerization and an unraider truenas you have their apps that are running on top of docker now you aren’t forced to

Use this if you don’t want with trueness and unraid i’d recommend to use theirs because they’re built on top of docker but with proxmox i’d go with a dedicated linux vm or container that runs docker itself so why do i keep mentioning docker well i’m not going to sit here and tell you

That docker is easy to pick up for beginners because it’s not it does however have a large community and plenty of support and as you can see in some hypervisors it has an entire gui built on top of it to make it easy to run services without even

Having to know much about docker at all you can choose to go this route and learn a bit along the way or spin up your own vm and dive head first into docker and use the cli either way docker will give you a consistent platform for deploying services no matter which linux

Space hypervisor you eventually go with oh and it also runs on mac os and windows neat and remember how we talked about compatibility on arm versus x86 well when you go to download a docker image for a particular software you can easily check the tags to see if it does

In fact support arm systems now if you don’t want to use docker at all then that’s perfectly fine too you can spin up entire vms with whatever os you want and run your apps there note that this does provide unnecessary overhead but if you’re more comfortable with that route

Then go for it at this point you’re pretty much set up and ready to go just a few more things before we wrap up all these cool services running you’re probably thinking about how to access them from outside your home network i have a few videos on how to get this set

Up and i’ll link them down below but just know that it is never a good idea to expose your hypervisor or firewall directly to the outside world i know it’s tempting to be able to access your hypervisor gui using your domain from anywhere in the world but be careful as

If this gets compromised then your entire system is exposed the correct way would be to set up a vpn connection to your home network and access your server that way another thing as cliche as it is is to have fun with it don’t be afraid to try new things and

Mess up assuming you’re not working with important data that has no backup you’re going to run into things that don’t work the way you want them to you will fail it happens to literally everyone that’s okay if you get stuck then reach out for help feel free to join the radar

Discord where we have lots of nerds willing to help out no matter how much of a beginner you are and i promise nobody will make you feel inferior for just trying to learn and if they do i’ll banish them to the shadow realm all right it is time for comment of the week

Where is my phone oh my god is i i did this last video i looked for my phone and i’m using it as the freaking teleprompter all right this comment comes from daniel c on my trueness scale uh intro video and he says hi will you make the change from proxmox to trueness

Scale i already set up proxmox but i think i like true nast scale more for how they manage storage so for your use what are your pros and cons and what would it take you to make the switch so as of right now i will still be using

Proxmox as my main production hypervisor os but i am thinking about changing my backup server from proxmox to truenas scale i just like the virtualization features built into proxmox a lot more than internet scale i will admit that truenetscale has a much better mass functionality built on top of it but

For my use case for my personal production machine i’m sticking with proxmox but if you would ask me for a beginner or for somebody setting up a nas which one to go with i would probably suggest trueness scale so that is it for this video i know there are a lot of things

Out there that i didn’t cover but this was meant to be a high level video for beginners if you liked the video and you thought it was entertaining or you’re just a super cool dude then drop a like and if you really just like the sound of

My voice then hit that subscribe button i’d like to give a shout out to my patreons and youtube members the absolute chads of the raid owl community that help support everything i do you guys are dope but that is all if you got this far in the video i sincerely appreciate it thank

You so much for watching and i will see you in the next one