As the 20th year of FUMBBL is about to be completed, I am looking at doing some hardware replacement for the site. The current hardware is getting quite old and it's easier to replace the hardware before it breaks.

Right now the oldest machine is fungus, running on hardware purchased May 2012. Willow (database server) is running on hardware from 2015 (although the drives have been replaced since then).

In order to do this, I am going to do an official hardware fund-raiser to purchase a new server to take over both web and database duties. As a token of appreciation, a small icon will be applied to the coach page of anyone who donates in January (actual icon TBD, but will be similar to the Borak and Deeproot icons which were given out in similar fashion previously). This icon will also be retroactively applied to anyone who donated this month (December) as well as I'd hate to tell people that they should have waited to donate in prep for this donation drive. This also applies to anyone who donated through Patreon.

The hardware I'm looking at for the upgrade is dependant on the amount this fund-raiser manages to collect, and it starts roughly at 2500 Euro to give you an idea of how expensive a server is. The rest of this post will be detailing some thoughts I have on what to get, so if you're not interested in that feel free to stop reading :)

The current hardware setup is those two previously mentioned servers and Deeproot (purchased 2017). Deeproot runs Hyper-V Server 2019 (a free version of Windows Server that runs only the virtualization role), and hosts a number of virtual machines for various purposes.

While the new server will be running virtualization software, I am moving away from Hyper-V because Microsoft is no longer providing the free version beyond the 2019 version (which will eventually be end-of-life). With that in mind, I am looking at a project called XCP-ng which is a free and open source hypervisor.

As part of this platform change I have to consider how to deal with storage. This is a very big topic in general, and for me an absolutely critical aspect of storage is resilience and redundancy. As such, I have been looking at ZFS instead of RAID (a topic I could elaborate on endlessly). Now, ZFS in general is fairly memory hungry, and having ZFS running on top of the same machine as a bunch of virtual machines (both database and web server machines are fairly memory hungry) isn't necessarily so easy.

Thus, in an ideal world I am hoping to raise enough funds to purchase two machines:
1. Hypervisor machine running XCP-ng
This would be a fairly CPU- and memory-heavy machine but with modest internal storage. I'm looking at something like an Intel 14700 or 14900 (probably non-K, I don't need the overclocking capability) with 128GB of DDR5 memory (on-die ECC). Potentially, this could be pushed up to 192GB to max out the platform.

2. File-server running TrueNAS Scale
This machine would be running a lesser CPU (still probably a 14th gen Intel, but with fewer cores), but also with a fair amount of RAM (128 GB seems like a reasonable place in terms of cost) and a number of drives. I'm probably looking at a small system drive, two very fast drives for ZFS SLOG, and a number of slower drives for bulk storage. I don't necessarily need an insane amount of storage, but would probably want to get at least 4TB of usable space split into 4-6 drives (ideally two volumes of three drives each in RaidZ1 mode).

These machines would communicate over a relatively high-speed 10GB link.

Some of you are wondering why Intel 14th gen rather than something AMD or Xeon? Basically it comes down to a few requirements I have:

1. Low noise. Since I run these servers in my home, noise levels must be controlled. I simply can not have noisy hardware without going crazy :)
2. Cost. Desktop hardware is significantly cheaper and despite looking at 2500 to 4000 euro for this hardware replacement, getting similar performance with more "enterprise grade" gear would multiply that cost many times.
3. Warranties, and easy replacement. This is why I am not looking for 2nd hand equipment at this point. I need to be able to source any of the components within a day if it breaks, so availability of components in local stores is critical to me.

If anyone reading this has experience with this type of tech (XCP-ng, TrueNAS, ZFS), I'd be happy to get some suggestions or ideas for how to configure it for the FUMBBL environment.

Either way, thanks for reading, and I truly appreciate any and all levels of support for the site (both monetary donations and time spent to make FUMBBL a better place).