I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but: I just ordered some old server gear (SuperMicro X9DRi-F and CSE-846 with 2xE5-2630L v2 and 64GB ECC RAM), and am looking into HDDs. My NEED is to expand my current storage solution, serve media to my house (currently happily using Plex), maintain a bittorrent client, and do it through my VPN.
My WANT is to experiment and play around with enterprise server gear and just generally do more, like having my own cloud storage solution. I'd like to play with some sandboxy-Windows VMs, an OSX VM, and some linux distros (not all at the same time). I'd also like to add whatever network security functionality I can, plus things like PiHole. The biggest issue is I'm struggling with the leap from consumer-grade solutions to enterprise-grade solutions.
I am currently leaning towards ESXi with FreeNAS and some utilities (like pihole, maybe a PXE server?), but there are just SO many options I don't really know where to go. I understand ESXi can do ZFS natively, is that better? Should I just use Ubuntu Server? The last thing I want to do is have to wipe the storage pool and start from scratch with re-transferring all the files over.
My WANT is to experiment and play around with enterprise server gear and just generally do more, like having my own cloud storage solution. I'd like to play with some sandboxy-Windows VMs, an OSX VM, and some linux distros (not all at the same time). I'd also like to add whatever network security functionality I can, plus things like PiHole. The biggest issue is I'm struggling with the leap from consumer-grade solutions to enterprise-grade solutions.
I am currently leaning towards ESXi with FreeNAS and some utilities (like pihole, maybe a PXE server?), but there are just SO many options I don't really know where to go. I understand ESXi can do ZFS natively, is that better? Should I just use Ubuntu Server? The last thing I want to do is have to wipe the storage pool and start from scratch with re-transferring all the files over.
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