What's the BEST home server operating system?

hey everybody this is Christian and in this video I want to talk about one of the challenges I had once I started to build my own home lab and I tried to find a good operating system that I wanted to run on my home servers because when you're starting to look for Server systems you will quickly find out it's quite overwhelming how many different solutions there are existing yeah we have all these different Linux distributions we have virtualization Technologies Nas softwares and so on there are literally hundreds of viable options you could choose from and even for an experienced Tech Guy it's sometimes a challenge to find out what are all the different capabilities and limitations of these systems nowadays with all the other complicated stuff we have in it like automation Docker or kubernetes it has really become easier so I thought let's discuss some of the options you have for running a Home Server I'm going to tell you what I'm running in my home lab how I'm solving different tasks like virtualization storage and Automation and what I believe are the best opera training systems for these specific use cases because yeah you can already guess if there isn't this one and only solution that is best in all situations that's what I can tell you right from the beginning but still I want to give you some guidance on which operating systems and solutions there are existing for home servers and what might be good in one particular setup and in another one you might just have better Alternatives so it's gonna be an interesting session let's start and talk through some of the options you have for running a Home Server this video is supported by teleport a free and open source access proxy that helps you to securely authenticate to all your it infrastructure like Linux servers databases kubernetes clusters web applications or remote desktop you can easily protect your accounts with modern security features such as two-factor authentication or a password that's locked in and access your services through the browser or the seal eye tool with audit logging and session recording and the best it's completely free in the community version so you can just download and run it in your entire home lab or if you would like to use it in your company teleport offers many professional features like auditing single sign-on and more it's a great tool so just check it out you will find a link to their website in the description of this video okay so first I want to talk about what I call the classic operating systems for servers yeah Linux and windows and let's start with Linux because I believe that's what probably most of you would like to run somewhere in a home lab and that for a good reason Linux is just an amazing operating system for home servers because it's free and it works nearly on all systems no matter if you would like to build a big server with lots of computing power in storage a small power efficient machine for your home level or just a tiny Raspberry Pi Linux just runs on all of these devices it's very stable and you will find tons of free open source applications for it you can build all sorts of scenarios like running a network storage installing a web server or databases run virtual machines the sky is the limit and that's why I've also installed Linux on my first Home Server here so that just seemed to be a perfect solution and I can tell you it's absolutely incredible from an experimenting and learning perspective of course when we talk about Linux we actually just mean the lyrics kernel yeah if you'd like to run and install Linux on your Home Server you will need to choose from hundreds of different predefined software packages around it the so-called Linux distributions and this is where it already gets a bit complicated because when you ask people what is the best Linux distribution for running a Home Server you will probably get many different answers some people will say oh it's Debian some others say Ubuntu is the best distribution some others will tell you it's red hat or Fedora because it is just a very subjective in sub communities even a controversial topic and you will see there are always people around who claim they found the best Linux distribution for running their desktops in home servers and in a few months they completely switch to another one which is from then on the batch Linux this division yeah so I'm not going to follow this discussion yeah I would say there isn't this one and only Linux distribution that is best for everybody it just depends a lot on your needs and personal preference but just to give you a good starting point when you want to install Linux on your home server and you really have no idea where to start I would just try out Ubuntu because for me umantu is still my top one Linux distribution and I always recommend it because it's great for beginners and Pros as well again I know people have many different opinions about Linux distributions but honestly I don't care Ubuntu has been great for me on all of my stores for almost 15 years now and because that hasn't really changed over time you can probably guess it is a good and reliable choice for running your servers as well actually actually in the last few years since containerization has come up the choice of a specific Linux distribution has an underlying system has become less important because a lot of the workloads today that are running on servers they aren't running on the main operating system anymore when I'm thinking about it I'm barely administrating Linux these days mostly I just run a few updates and a couple of other packages the real applications the workloads I'm running mostly in a container which is completely isolated from the other packages that are running in the host and here the Linux distribution actually doesn't make such a big difference because containers they are standard across all these Solutions no matter if you're using red hat openshift or canonicals micro kubernetes on Ubuntu Ranchos k3s Docker or podman which Linux distribution you are using for your home servers doesn't matter so much as you might think it does however if you still want to have a comparison about some great Linux distributions for home servers I've made a video about this in the past where I'm diving a bit deeper into the actual diff references of Ubuntu Debian and some other options so if you'd like to check it out I've put your link in the video description and by the way because we're just speaking about my other videos if you haven't already done it like this one and subscribe to my channel that would be so kind because it really makes a difference in the YouTube algorithm back to the topic so in a few words Linux is amazing especially if you're into containers kubernetes clusters but even if you don't yeah it's a great choice as a Home Server operating system and you can probably just pick one of the popular Linux distributions that are good for servers and then install it on your machine and just deploy your workloads on it but this is just one of the options for running a Home Server there are many other Solutions and setups I want to talk with you about for example Windows is also an option some people will now say ah forget about Windows but I always like to be a bit of a counterweight against this Linux Fanboy isn't because Windows is still the most used operating system in the cobot world that doesn't necessarily make it a good choice for Home Server of course let's still if you are into home labs and Tech stuff you should keep an eye on the Windows server and for some people it might be good if you don't like to be on a terminal or you have a very specific use case maybe a couple of applications that only run on a Windows operating system then the Windows Server can be an option however I understand that Windows Server might not be the preferred system to run a Home Server for most people yeah because it requires a license and overall Linux is in my opinion just the better choice in a direct comparison here but still it is a nice side project to take a look at maybe not as your maid operating system but for running it in a virtual machine which by the way takes me to the second group of solutions I'd like to talk with you about because if you are like me and you like to run and test many different operating systems and applications running them all on separate physical machines that would be quite inefficient and also expensive you would probably end up buying just hundreds of different home servers and that is why you should really use visualization whenever it's possible that allows you to run multiple operating systems on one single machine so you don't need to choose one operating system and that will be your main one forever you can always try and test out new things like different Linux distributions we just talked about that or install a Windows server on it there are so many great things you can all do with virtualization and although you can run virtual machines on a Linux distribution like Ubuntu there are in my opinions better platforms around just made for that one task because running an administrating virtual machines requires a bunch of different softwares and packages you need to install and manage you need a virtualization layer obviously maybe you'd like to have an interface to easily manage and create new virtual machines or you need to take snapshots configure backups and monitoring and that can all be quite painful to set up yourself under Linux trust me because I've tried it before that was actually the main reason why I stopped running Ubuntu directly on my home servers Hardware software once I started to look a bit deeper into virtual machine management or storage pools with the the ZFS file system I realized setting it up on a Linux distribution myself like Ubuntu requires a lot of additional work and skills and you can really save yourself a lot of headaches and trouble if you just pick one of the hypervisor platforms that you install in your Home Server first which usually comes with a nice interface and all the other tools like managing backup storage and networking and then just run a Linux or maybe a Windows server on top of it however this obviously throws up another question which hypervisor platform is then the best for your home servers and I'd just like to cover a few solutions that I've been working with in the past and I also want to tell you what I'm using right now for example there is the Microsoft hyper-v which is not free by the way and you can just use it to run virtual machines with all types of operating systems such as Linux servers or other windows servers I've worked a bit with the Microsoft hyper-v in the beginning of my it apprenticeship yeah we had a couple of small and medium-sized businesses where we just use this as an operating system to virtualize multiple servers honestly I don't like it much because compared to other hypervisor platforms the Microsoft hyper-v is a bit Limited in terms of feature set and it's really annoying to administrate what I've also been working with during that time was VMware in the free hypervisor e6i that you will probably see often in the Enterprise field in a data center for example but also in smaller environments you can work with a free VMware hypervisor e6i it is a great solution for virtualization however I have to say that is also a system that I personally wouldn't run on a Home Server because a lot of the advanced features of VMware are licensed and they can't be used on the free version of es6i for example I like to automate the deployment of my virtual machines with terraform and this requires right access to the API of the hypervisor which isn't supported in the free version of e6i and I just don't like messing around with this complicated licensing stuff or just other smaller things like the old and clunky web UI they scared me away from VMware a long time ago in my opinion there is a better alternative hypov is a platform existing that is just perfect for personal home servers and you can get it completely for free for most of you guys it won't be surprising because it's proxbox which is an open source solution based on Linux and KVM it allows you to visualize all sorts of workloads yeah you can even build High availability clusters with it it has some nice features for managing storage and containers and it is really great with automation for example I've recently made a video about how to automate virtual machine deployments with proxmox terraform and Pekka where all my VMS are now defined as code that allows me to spin up new servers with pre-installed packages and configurations in just about a few seconds that is absolutely incredible it also has an API functionality or metrics logging that you can integrate into your monitoring solution but even if you're just starting to explore virtualization as a beginner proxmox is very intuitive to use it has a nice and clean web interface that you can easily use to create new virtual machines add containers or or storages manage backups and snapshots all that stuff is really very straightforward and once you start playing around with it a bit more you're going to love all the advanced features that you can use like cloud in it create VM templates and deploy them through API all the time that I've used proxmox it hasn't disappointed me so when I would need to pick one favorite operating system for my home servers I would say it's proxmos there's just one problem you might run into when you try to install it in a smaller home lab because it doesn't work on arm-based CPUs like a Raspberry Pi I've seen there is a similar project around that's called pymox but I have really tested it and honestly I don't know how much sense it makes to run virtual machines with the limited Hardware capabilities of a Raspberry Pi and so in that particular case if you just want to start building a home lab with a Raspberry Pi you should still go with the Linux distribution something like Ubuntu skip the virtual machine layer and just deploy your workloads in containers instead but I can't really see any other situation where you would not like to run proxmox on your home servers maybe just one more and that is when you are not primarily into virtual machines maybe you sometimes play around with it but your focus is more on storage and you would like to have a more complete all-in-one solution for your Home Server that's easy to administrate and this is the third group of system that you could use in my opinion and this is using a NASA system such as trueness scale even though the original idea of a system like this is to build a network attached storage it has become far more than that for example I've recently made a video about true net scale saying that this might be the perfect Home Server operating system because it isn't just a great storage server anymore by the way you can still build a great storage server with it you can bundle multiple hard drives together in a redundant and High Performance Pool and use it as an ass machine but it also allows you to easily run and configure hundreds of useful applications and packages that you would typically run on a Home Server just take a look at the amazing true charts project that's made by the community of trunes scale that allows you to easily spin up new apps on this Nas system with just a few clicks I believe they even just released a newer version of that and you can build your own private storage with nexcloud or run home assistant for smart home automation a Plex Media Server there are so many cool charts and useful Home Server application occasions sure you can also do a similar things in proxmox as well or with the Linux distribution like Ubuntu but then you still might need to set up a few things on your own yeah and you don't have this worry-free solution in a coherent interface like on trueness so that's in my opinion the best possible use case for Journal scale if you want a single Home Server where you can securely store all your data run some applications for self-hosting maybe just run one or two virtual machines to occasionally try out new things but you don't really need Advanced virtualization features you just want to have a reliable solid all-in-one system that's easy to administrate in a web interface then Junior scale will be a great choice in a direct comparison to proxbox you can see what the differences are like virtual machines on tune as they might not have as great features as on proxmox you are missing a few automation features like the API and terraform integration the but on the other hand you can also do some cool things in true net scale that you can't do natively in proxmox so what should I say at the end yeah it's not always easy to decide between all these different solutions as I said it depends a lot on your personal preferences on your use cases and your skills if I would now start my whole home lab project again and I would need to pick an operating system to get started with I would pick proxbox as my main operating system to run a Home Server and then start exploring other options like running one or more Linux servers as virtual machines try and experiment with different Linux distributions and containerization with Docker and kubernetes you probably know all this stuff from my other videos but if you aren't so interested in these Advanced things you could also go with the nas system like trueness as your main Os or if you are completely crazy like me and you want to even run more workloads in your home lab just use both for example I'm running a proxmox server in my home lab that's obviously for running my virtual machines on these virtual machines there I'm running mostly Ubuntu Linux for Docker and kubernetes and then I also have a big storage server that is running through their scale this is why I store all my data for making YouTube videos or any other project files by the way in the next video I should give you a complete tour of my home lab and show you which devices I'm actually running in my server rack because there are a few more but I believe that's about it for this video because I know uh that was really a lot of stuff even if I didn't cover half of the other options and Alternatives you could also use to run on your Home Server I guess many people in the comments sections are not going to ask hey why did you choose proxmox and why did you pick trueness what about open media world or what about xcpng and so on yeah I know there are many other platforms and systems and options however at some point you just need to stop looking for Alternatives and just go with the solutions that serve you well because otherwise you just end up trying hundreds of different systems and softwares and solutions that all kind of do the same thing and it's not getting you anywhere in ID but still a few choices for running a Home Server they probably make more sense than others and I hope this video was a bit helpful to get a better idea of that and yeah so these were the best operating system and platforms that I've used so far on my Home Server please tell me what are your thoughts about these Solutions or what else are you using maybe I missed something important I I believe I probably did anyway I really like to hear from you guys and as always thanks everybody for watching I will catch you in the next tutorial or video we will see bye bye

Channel: Christian Lempa

Views: 303,169

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Id: xWz_-gyv3j4

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023