Home server specification

[Sunnyknight]

Hi folks.

 

Im hoping to build / buy a server for home that I can host for online games.

These games include:-

-7daystodie

-dayz

-minecraft

-castlestory

 

I was wondering if anyone has any experience in this field? Im thinking along the lines of a xeon processor and 16gb of ram. Unsure...... help? I have a 75down and 15up fibre connection.

[dhicks]

Im hoping to build / buy a server for home that I can host for online games.

 

The HP Micro Server seems to be most people's home server of choice - affordable, quite exapandable and very capable for its size. The newest version even has ILO capabilities included on the network card (I think you need to buy a license to enable it, worth checking). I'm not sure how much noise they put out these days - I imagine they aren't the loudest of servers, but might be worth checking if you're planning on having this in your front room or something.

[Sunnyknight]

I was thinking more round the like of dell poweredge? Or the tower versions?

 

The hp micros dont stack a big punch ie ram or processor. Budget is 500 quid.

[pete]

Have you looked at the i3 or i5 NUCs? You won't get raid or anything, but if all you care about is grunt they might do the job.

[dhicks]

I was thinking more round the like of dell poweredge? Or the tower versions?

 

We used the Dell PowerEdge tower servers (T100 series, I think) at my last school, 5 years or so ago - they were good machines, quiet enough to be placed in the corner of a classroom. I see Dell now do the PowerEdge T110 II, which looks like the latest model in the series. You can specify the RAM and processor your want. They also do the PwerEdge T20, which looks like their answer to the HP Miniserver, but (by the looks of it) capable of taking a few more drives and expansion slots. Again, you can specify the RAM and processor you want right from Dell's website. The T100 series servers were certainly very good when I last used them, and the T1100 is currently on PC Pro's A-List so it looks as though the quality is still good a few years on.

[notalot]

personally I have 2 servers running at home, 1 is a Dell PowerEdge III (cant remember the model off hand) and the other is a HP ProLiant DL385p Gen8 Server, The Dell server is running 2 FTB Minecraft servers though multicraft along with a few plugins to allow it to use multiple cores running with 2 dulecore AMD CPU's running at 3ghz.

 

The HP server is running with Vsphere hypervisor on it running 1 Ubuntu server and 1 Windows 2008 server, The Ubuntu server is running 8 Minecraft servers (housing 60-80 players at any time) the windows side is running a Dayz server, 7days to die server, No more room in hell, 2 TF2 servers and 2 Man vs Machine servers. it has 6 500gb drives running in raid 5 with a hot spare (due to the age of the server didn't trust the Hard drives but couldn't afford to replace them). The HP server was second hand brought from a user on edugeek. All these things run the cpu's at 75% across the board, uses roughly 28GB of ram (most of which is in the minecraft side).

 

If you like when I get home tonight ill pull the specs off for you.

[Sunnyknight]

personally I have 2 servers running at home, 1 is a Dell PowerEdge III (cant remember the model off hand) and the other is a HP ProLiant DL385p Gen8 Server, The Dell server is running 2 FTB Minecraft servers though multicraft along with a few plugins to allow it to use multiple cores running with 2 dulecore AMD CPU's running at 3ghz.

 

The HP server is running with Vsphere hypervisor on it running 1 Ubuntu server and 1 Windows 2008 server, The Ubuntu server is running 8 Minecraft servers (housing 60-80 players at any time) the windows side is running a Dayz server, 7days to die server, No more room in hell, 2 TF2 servers and 2 Man vs Machine servers. it has 6 500gb drives running in raid 5 with a hot spare (due to the age of the server didn't trust the Hard drives but couldn't afford to replace them). The HP server was second hand brought from a user on edugeek. All these things run the cpu's at 75% across the board, uses roughly 28GB of ram (most of which is in the minecraft side).

 

If you like when I get home tonight ill pull the specs off for you.

 

Im visiting you tonight. Lol

 

Yes please spec me up!

@dhicks the dell t320 looks promising.... if I could get one second hand

@pete spec meeeeer

Edited January 23, 2014 by Sunnyknight

[PotNoodleTech]

You need to work out exactly how much CPU power you need to host those games. No point in buying a quad CPU monster if they would all run fine off a HP microserver?

 

Second hand HP DLxxx Gen 5 or 6? Should be able to pick up a dual CPU 24+GB ram couple of SAS drives jobbie for under £500.

 

Your electricity bill won't be pretty with one of those tho!

[featured_spectre]

Can you afford the extra £100-£200 a month electric bill this will bring with hosting all the time?

[dhicks]

Can you afford the extra £100-£200 a month electric bill this will bring with hosting all the time?

 

That seems a tad high - I have two servers running at home, and we haven't noticed a huge increase in electricity bills. If average electric costs in the UK are £0.172 per kWh, a server drawing a constant 100W (0.1kW) would cost:

 

£0.172 * 0.1kWh = £0.0172 per hour -> £0.0172 * 24 = £0.4128 per day -> £0.4128 * 30 = £12.384 per month (ish).

 

Edit: just done a quick check, seemingly the "average" server (maybe a 2U rackmount, probably with some disks in) consumes (maybe) 472W, which works out at around £60 per month using the pricing above. I'm guessing that figure is for something like you'd find in a data centre, running a constant load all day (being an always-on webserver or whatever), but Nephilim has a point - if people are going to be using your server all through the day and there's some kind of load on it, it is going to take some money in electricity.

Edited January 23, 2014 by dhicks

[featured_spectre]

typo...should have been £10-£20

[Norphy]

Unless you're using something which needs ECC RAM, using a Xeon in a single CPU configuration is pretty pointless. If I were you, I'd spec a mid-range i5 or i7 PC in a case with room for a decent amount of hard drives and just chuck a load of RAM in it.

 

IMO using server class hardware for something like this would be chucking money away for no good reason.

[buzzard]

from my days with CoD and CoD2 servers, it doesn't need to be THAT beefy as all heavy stuff is done on peoples PC's.... what are the dedi server specs for the games?? It IS a few years since my kids made time for me to turn my gaming PC on though

[pete]

@pete spec meeeeer

 

I'm using one of these: NUC Core i3-3217U with 16GB and a mSATA SSD to host ~10 thin-provisioned vms in a ESXi lab setup. It's been running since I bought it (August 2013?) and it's barely idling.

 

Spec sheet here:Intel® NUC Kit DC3217IYE

 

Upside is it's quiet, tiny and doesn't suck a lot of power. Downside is there's no expansion unless you want to go all @dhicks with a mSATA > SATA breakout.

 

The newer versions support 2.5" drives.

 

Intel® NUC

Edited January 23, 2014 by pete

[dhicks]

Downside is there's no expansion unless you want to go all @dhicks with a mSATA > SATA breakout.

 

The original thread where me and Pete discuss this is here:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/thin-client-virtual-machines/113713-amazon-ec2.html#post975502

 

I bought one of Tranquil PC's NUC casings, which turns the NUC into a solid chunk of passivly-cooled computing power:

 

NUC

 

As described in that thread linked to above, I managed to bodge connecting 10 SATA drives via a mini-PCIe card and a couple of SATA expander cards - I wanted to try and see if I could create a Backblaze-style server for home use. It's not the cheapest way of going about setting up a home server - I live in a open-plan flat, and my girlfriend wouldn't stand for a rackmount server sat under the TV. If you don't mind a bit of fan noise (and those smaller Dell servers were very quiet in operation) then you can probably get something with a bit more expansion space for the same money.

 

If you do want silent and still want expansion space, I also have one of Tranquil PC's "media centre" machines that's been running as a server for good 3 years with no problems. Streacom now do very similar cases, some to fit larger motherboards, too, if you want to build your own and save a bit of money.

[notalot]

Ok so I got the servers mixed up, the Dell is a Dell PowerEdge III 2950 and is running the Hyperviser and the Hp is a HP ProLiant DL 385 Gen2 and runs the 2 FTB Minecraft servers

 

Dell specs:

2 Quad core Intel Xeon E5430 @ 2.66 GHz

32 GB DDR2 800 Ram

6 7.2k 500GB Hard Drives running in Raid 5 with 1 hot spare

 

HP Specs:

2 Dual Core AMD Opteron, not sure of the model @ 3.0 GHz

16 GB DDR 400 Ram

2 10k 500GB running in Raid 1, the server doesn't have any slots for more drives

 

All of this is backup up with a 1500 APC UPS and backs up to my desktop every night (with a horrible set of scripts)

 

Lastly my net is a BT Business line running at 76mb down and 19 up.

 

The cost of running all of this is about £100 per month. £60 of that is on the connection.

 

The big thing that I found running this from home was keeping it cool through the summer, during winter its not a problem, in summer the servers get quite hot but never enough to worry me or power them down.

Edited January 23, 2014 by notalot

[Sunnyknight]

@pete @dhicks

 

I have had a look at the tech you posted, but it just seems to compact and doesn't have a whole lot of room.

 

I'm looking for something in the range of what @notalot is running, only with 32gb ddr3 ram (ddr2 is just too slow).

 

The above @notalot post) goes for around £200 on ebay. How much more would i fork out for the equivalent processor and ram but in todays age?

[Earthling]

At the risk of sounding uncool and out of the loop........what's Dayz?

[notalot]

To be fair you would be surprised how far DDR2 will go.

 

As I've said above I'm running some fairly intensive game servers with a large number of players across them, I tend to find that the Hard Disk access times are the bottle neck rather than the ram.

 

On eBay the prices are looking like £300-£500 ish in the dell range something like a Dell PowerEdge R710 and HP Proliant DL380 G6 if your really wanting the DDR3 but I'm not sure if you really need it.

[PotNoodleTech]

Compared to the difference the hard drives make to your server performance - you wouldn't even notice whether you had ddr2 or ddr3 ram.

[rich_tech]

I was looking in custom PC magazine last night, theres a couple of manufacturers there offering pretty decent "entry-level" high-end PCs at around the £500 mark or just over, I would be tempted to consider one of them over a specific server if your looking for something a bit more beefy than a Microserver, the PSUs though are a thing to be wary of, as they can start to smash the electric bill in if you use it a lot (my main rig has a 550w psu and its quite noticable on the usage when that things on a lot in things like school hols instead of my two hours a couple of times a night)