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I agonized about this for years. I wanted a proper server, not something embedded or a Pi with a rat's nest of cables, that would still fit in a credenza in the living room. Ended up getting an HP MicroServer Gen8 and absolutely love it. Same cube design as the DS918+, but with proper iLO (remote media, etc.), lots of boot options, and very stoutly built. It feels like a real HP DL300-series server (the Gen9 does not IMHO). I bought it as it was being discontinued. It's running VMware ESXi with FreeNAS on top of that, with an LSI SAS card connected to the drive bays, then hardware-pass-through'ed to the FreeNAS VM. I've got the home's DNS server, Pi-hole, Unifi controller, test VMs, etc. happily virtualized alongside FreeNAS. 16GB RAM total, with 8GB dedicated to FreeNAS. Boot is off a microSD card (on the motherboard, naturally) and VM datastore is on an SSD connected where the optical drive would go. I know I'm violating several recommendations here (low RAM, virtualized FreeNAS, SAS card passed through, etc. etc.) but it does indeed work, very well in fact. 2+ years of serving the home. With the Gen8, HP built almost the perfect home server for tech-oriented types... pity they cost-reduced its successor. |