New server (Introduction)

I finally got a bit of time to write about the new server I built last year. It has been up and running since May 2012. It runs Mountain Lion Server with Open Directory allowing me to manage multiple users and devices on my home network; stores and shares my media collection; handles Time Machine backups; and serves as a web server for some of my small projects.

The Microserver is now serves as an offsite backup unit storing nightly zfs snapshots of the data. It seems to work fine for this purpose.

Lets start with listing the requirements I had for the server box. Here they are in no particular order.

1. Capacity. I want the server to maintain a huge data storage pool. The box has to hold a lot of hard drives. How many hard drives should I plan for? That sort of comes down to the next topic…
2. Reliability. I want the storage to be very reliable to possible hard drive failures. If I use zfs for storage, I can dedicate some drives for the actual data and some for redundant information that can recover files in case of drive failure. (It does not work exactly like this, but it’s OK for the analysis.) I estimated that I need space for 6 drives: 4 to old the data and 2 for redundancy. If I go with 2TB drives, it gives me 8TB storage. If I use 3TB drives, it comes to 12TB storage, which should serve me well for quite a while.
3. Blu-ray. I need a space for a Blu-ray drive to watch movies and write and occasional disk.
4. Finally, I need space for a system drive, because it’s very likely I would not be able to boot from a ZFS drive.
5. The box has to be small. I have a Mac Pro at home and I do not need another box of similar size sitting around.
6. It has to be quiet. The box will be sitting in a living room and I do not want to hear it.
7. I want the box to run MacOS X. I can configure a Linux box, but it would take me too much time and effort that I do not want to expend.
8. It has to be powerful enough to run some computational tasks, like indexing and searching of document collections.
9. It’s a server, so it does not need support for a very good graphics card. At the same I want to be able to plugin a DVI monitor occasionally.

Why did I want to replace the Microserver? With 6 drives mounted inside, it has no space for an optical drive (fail on #3). It uses a very power efficient CPU, which is fine for a file server, but insufficient for any other tasks (fail on #8). It uses AMD CPU. OSX for AMD is getting less and less support from the hackintosh community and AMD compatibility with the current OSX versions is falling behind. For example, OSX kernel runs in 32 bit mode on an AMD CPU. The latest ZEVO requires 64 bit kernel. So, I cannot update my ZFS setup on the Microserver beyond the ZEVO Developer Edition beta from last summer.

So, why did I not go with a Mac Pro? Because of three reasons: Mac Pro is huge (#5), there is not enough space for 6 hard drives in a Mac Pro (#1), and it’s expensive. Very expensive. Finally, while researching the information about the Microserver, I got drawn into the experience of building a computer and I wanted to build one.

This story will have multiple parts. I will cover the hardware parts, the assembly, the system installation, the software, and configuration. I plan to organize the notes I made, write down the reasons for the choices I made while assembling the server, and describe the lessons I learned in the meantime.