WHS Replacement(s)

After my WHS v1 server blew a system drive for the third time in five years, I decided to switch my home storage to OMV. After all, my Sun Fire v100 webserver has run for seven years with barely a reboot - it was time to ditch Windows for good.

I've just updated my main PC, so I repurposed the old bits (Core 2 Quad Q6600, 8GB RAM) for the my new OMV box. Combined with a new Antec 4RU 4U22ATX case and 3x WD30EFRX Reds in RAID5 plus a WD Blue 500GB system drive, it was ready to start staging the data from the dead WHS.

I built the hardware from the old WHS (Core i3, 16GB RAM) into a second Antec 4U22ATX and mounted the WD Blue 500GB system drive, 3x 1TB WD Greens and 3x 2TB WD Greens from the WHS into the case. I love these cases, there is so much room and such great airflow. It's up to 39 degrees C here at the moment, and with the fans going in the rack the drives rarely top 45deg.

Then began the long process of mounting the NTFS drives and rsyncing them carefully to a staging share on the first machine. I started with the 1TB drives, cleaned them off and built a new 1.8TB RAID5 with them. Now I had enough space between the 2 machines for all the data from the 3x2TB drives, and as I type this I'm moving the last lot of files off them. Next will be forming them into a 3.6TB RAID5 (giving me just under 11TB total over 3 arrays, plus system drives) and finally organising everything properly.

The first box with the (hopefully more reliable) Reds will be for irreplacable content such as photos, home video, my Git repo and network backups (via Acronis True Image 2013 or RSync as appropriate) plus it will run Nginx + Passenger + MySQL for Rails apps (and my son's Minecraft server). The second box will be for media serving via DLNA/DAAP/Air Video, plus sabnzbd+ and SickBeard. I also plan to decommission my v100 by moving my webserver, website databases and Subversion repo to the second OMV box, with database and websites backed up to the first OMV box.

Thanks to the OMV team for a great product. It's made the setup of things like RSync and Samba super easy and saved me probably weeks of frustration in what was already a frustrating time losing my WHS again. I'll be donating next payday.

Pics attached. Sorry no inline, spam prevention is catching them.

I'd recommend putting it somewhere cool and soundproof - the fans make a lot of noise, especially in hot climates when you need the top extractor fan on as well. Mine's in the garage.

Thanks for the comments. A few updates:

- Installed Serviio on #2
- I installed TightVNC and XFCE on both so that I can manage things like Serviio and VirtualBox that are much easier to manage in a GUI
- I've added VirtualBox to #1 and am perma-running a Win7 VM. Basically I wanted a remote email system so that I can access all my email accounts and my Outlook archives from anywhere - the VM perma-runs Outlook and I can check it from iPad, desktop at home or my work machine via RDP.

There's a simple answer to your confusion: I'm an idiot. I didn't see there was an OMV plugin for VirtualBox, so I installed it manually.

If I install the plugin now, will it take over managing the existing VBox install, or should I remove it and start fresh?

Cheers tekk. I might just wait for the plugin update, it's all running fine now and I have dozens of other tasks queued up Thanks for the advice.