HP Microserver and VMWare ESXi 6.7

After having put 4 or more running LXC-containers on the Turris I was disappointed with the speed of the systems that were installed. To be honest: I was using the Router as a server for my whole internet services and thats not what its designed for. Despite the speed everything was working flawlessly, so kudos to the openwrt- and the Turris-Team. I was asking myself how many virtual servers i essentially needed and came up with quite a number for my little homeserver:

  • Webserver for https://arvidortwig.de with WordPress (so Apache, PHP and SQL) plain html
  • Nextcloud (also Apache, PHP and SQL as well 100 GB free disk space)
  • FTP-Server (i am using ProFTPd with another 100 GB)
  • TorRelay (Tor and Nyx)
  • Transmission Bittorrent Client (Transmission itself and another 100 GB)
  • MiniDLNA (for streaming my media into the LAN with 4 TB of disk space)
  • FreeNAS (which needs at least 8 GB of RAM for the ZFS)

I figured it would be best to put everything on one server running multiple instances of Debian on VMWare ESXi 6.7 (which is free for home use if you register on their website). So if you add up the RAM necessary to run all these little machines and maybe more to come in the future at least a small server and not a router would be the device to work with ???? I thought about building a server myself but the design of the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) microserver and the reliability of the hardware convinced me to look into the machines provided by HPE. Finally I decided to go with a HPE ProLiant Microserver Gen10 with a more powerful quadcore AMD Opteron X3421 CPU and 16 GB of RAM. I have 4 drives for the data installed: 2x 1TB Seagate drives and 2x 8TB Seagate drives. Additionally a 250 GB SSD is serving as disk for the ESXi and the VMs. I have to admit: This tiny cube is fast as hell and capable of hosting all the services i need.So Goodbye Turris Omnia, Goodbye Rasperry Pi, Goodbye Synology DS214play… you served me well as server-replacements. But now the machine is taking over…