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- #Best home server os 2017 install
- #Best home server os 2017 update
- #Best home server os 2017 software
- #Best home server os 2017 windows
Why did Michael have to build a whole new server just to install a different VM manager?” It’s because I failed to anticipate the importance of remote administration. If you read the above and thought, “Kimchi is just software. My VM server is tucked away in the corner, which is convenient except for the occasional instance where I need physical access. And there were infuriating UI bugs where buttons disappeared or shifted position right before I clicked on them. I often had to click a VM’s “clone” or “shutdown” button multiple times before it cooperated. Over time, Kimchi’s shortcomings became more and more apparent. VMWare was far more polished and mature, but Kimchi charmed me with its scrappy spirit and open-source nature.Įarly listing of my VMs through Kimchi’s web UIĪlmost immediately after I installed it, development on Kimchi stopped.Ĭode commits to Kimchi, which stop almost immediately after I started using it
#Best home server os 2017 software
Pick better VM management software ?︎įor my first server, I evaluated two options for VM management: Kimchi and VMWare ESXi. Node.js builds involve tons of random disk access, a worst-case scenario for network storage. Modern web frameworks all use Node.js, so every project has anywhere from 10k-200k random JavaScript files in its dependency tree. Since then, I’ve expanded into frontend web development. At the time of my first build, most of my development work was on backend Python and Go applications, and they didn’t perform significant disk I/O. Second, random disk access over the network is slow. The OS on my storage server requires frequent upgrades.
#Best home server os 2017 windows
It was the same reboot problem I had when I ran VMs on my Windows desktop.
#Best home server os 2017 update
With my VMs running on top of Synology’s storage, I had to shut down my entire VM fleet before applying any update from Synology. Synology publishes OS upgrades every couple of months, and their patches always require reboots. On my first build, I relied on my 10.9 TB of network storage.įirst, running VMs on network storage creates a strict dependency on the disk server. With all that network storage space, I thought, “why put more disk space on the server than the bare minimum to boot the host OS?”
![best home server os 2017 best home server os 2017](https://blog.purestorage.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Screen-Shot-2017-06-08-at-10.27.54-AM.png)
My Synology NAS has 10.9 TB of storage capacity. My 2017 build served me well, but in three years of using it, I’ve come to recognize a few key areas begging for improvement. With a local VM server, I can keep 10-20 VMs available and ready at all times without worrying about micromanaging my costs. I could substantially reduce costs by turning cloud instances on and off as needed, but that would introduce friction into my workflows. Using AWS instead of my homelab server would cost me over $6k per year. For VM resources similar to my homelab server, AWS EC2 instances would cost over $6k per year: Why not use cloud computing? ?︎Ĭloud servers could serve the same function and save me the trouble (fun!) of maintaining my own hardware, but it’s prohibitively expensive. Many people use them as a low-stakes practice environment before using the same tools in a real-world business context. Homelab servers are no different from any other servers, except that you build them at home rather than in an office or data center. Homelab is just a colloquial term that’s grown in popularity in the last few years. The VM host runs a minimal set of software, so crashes and mandatory reboots are rare. That was fine for a while, but reboots became a huge hassle.īetween forced reboots from Windows Update, voluntary restarts to complete software installs, and the occasional OS crash, I had to restart my entire suite of development VMs three to five times per month.Ī dedicated VM server spares me most reboots. Originally, I used VirtualBox to run VMs from my Windows desktop. If you’re not interested in the “why” of this project, you can jump directly to the build. I decided to build a brand new homelab VM server for 2020.Ĭomponents of my new VM server build (most of them, anyway) I don’t care about the backstory show me your build! ?︎
![best home server os 2017 best home server os 2017](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ed/Start_screen_on_Windows_Server_2012.png)
My projects have become more resource-hungry, and mistakes I’d made in my first build were coming back to bite me. In the past few months, I began hitting the limits of my VM server. It’s been a fantastic investment, as it sped up numerous dev tasks and improved reliability. Three years ago, I took things to the next level by building my own homelab server to host all of my VMs. Each of my projects gets a dedicated VM, sparing me the headache of dependency conflicts and TCP port collisions. For the past five years, I’ve done all of my software development in virtual machines (VMs).