I built my current server circa 1Q2019. It’s a Dell PowerEdge R720. Equipped with 2x Intel E5-2680 2.7GHz 16C Processors, 128gb of ECC Ram, and presently populated with 2x Raid 1 Mirrored Sata SSD 120gb drives for image storage, 2x Raid 1 Mirrored Sata SSD 1TB drives for sysvol, and a JBOD array of 4x10TB Western Digital White Label (pulls from EasyStore).
It runs VMWare ESXi baremetal hypervisor. ESXi in turn hosts Open Media Vault (smb shares/local user management), Docker (debian base), Windows Server 2016 (lab), Mac OSX (because I can), HomeAssistant OS (legacy – see replacement).
It has power in spades, the vast majority of which goes idle 99.9% of the time. One of its most important functions is hosting my Plex Media Server – ‘Jeflix’ to share movies and tv with family. Works pretty solid in the house on the local network. I can support local native playback of 4k video provided its low bitrate. Somewhat limiting in that any higher bit rate, which comes along with higher quality rips of movies that support HDR, additional audio (DTS/Dolby)…would require transcoding for anyone watching outside the local network. Currently all but a few select titles are ripped in 720 or 1080, largely because they don’t require transcoding. I considered trying to add a dedicated gpu to the R720 but that turned out to be more trouble than it would have been worth. Despite sitting largely idle it uses more power than I’d prefer and with ever increasing power costs, its time to move to a new solution.
After months/years/who remembers anymore of research I’ve decided on a path forward…or at least most of a path…more on that later. I’m going to build a small cluster of commodity hardware (micro or sff towers) with modest resources to run basic containers and VM’s. Primary storage array will be external, to be determined. My hope is that any one of the nodes in the cluster should be more than capable of the services I require of it, with the added benefit of redundancy in hardware and surge expansion when needed. Rather than search for hardware with dedicated GPU, intels dedicated graphics on the 6th-current generations of their i3/i5/i7/i9 family should provide more than adequate transcoding muscle to allow me to grow my library to higher resolution/bitrate rips.
Now the search begins. Oh, and I still have to decide how I want to handle a large datastore array.
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