Is Houston and other Storinator tooling installed by default, or are we expected to install our own stack on the hardware? If the latter, what are folks using?
I currently have an Unraid server so wondering if this is what I should install in this new machine, or if there’s something else that’s better suited for the hardware.
Welcome to the 45HomeLab community @manthan! It’s great to have you here!
From some of the other posts and comments I have been reading, it seems that the HL15 comes with Houston installed by default. I personally will be installing TrueNAS Scale on my build. The hardware will work with any server OS or NASos that you could imagine.
Thanks for the reply! Curious, what is the advantage of TrueNAS over the default installation?
My current server (about to be decommissioned) leverages Unraid. I ran into TrueNAS and ZFS while selecting the OS for this previous server, but at the time I was restricted to 16GB of memory so stopped and settled on Unraid (also there were advantages around Docker management). Now I have access to ~80GB of memory in this unit with about 50TB of storage so that’s no longer a blocker.
I am technical so an initial learning curve shouldn’t be a problem if it’s worth switching for performance or some other reason! (If you have a perspective on Unraid vs. Default/TrueNAS as well, would love to hear)
I look at it this way - It seems that in the HL community there is A LOT of people that use TrueNAS. If you ever have problems with something in my experience it’s easy to find solutions to problems when there is a higher chance that someone else has had the same issue.
I also did some testing with some of the NAS os’s and at the time I just like the UI for TrueNAS. I still really like it and now it’s just what I use. It really just comes down to personal preference to me. Also, as a side note - I use my NAS as ONLY a NAS. I do not run any extra things on my NAS like VMs, or Containers, so that doesn’t matter to me either in this case.
Ah, that makes sense. How much RAM are you running your server with? Depending on the thread I’m browsing, the requirements seem to vary between 1GB per TB to 5GB per TB (and overall CPU demand). The latter would throw me well past the amount needed
I will be using 64GB of RAM in my build but will probably upgrade in the future. I will have 84TB in my server. (6x14TB HDDs)
My fully built system is running Rocky Linux 8, and comes with houston pre-installed.
It is also running XFCE UI in case you hook it up to a monitor, or manage it over IPMI.
Although oddly enough houston (cockpit) wasn’t running by default on my system so I had to enable that via systemd before I could launch the web ui
My biggest complaint is that its running what I consider an ancient kernel (4.18). But as long as I only want to use it as a ZFS NAS, thats probably good enough.
I’ll probably try and move this server to ubuntu 22.04 once houston is supported on there.
Hey @manthan,
Yes, all of the Fully Built HL15 servers ship with Rocky Linux pre-installed with an xfce desktop environment. Houston, as well as all of our cockpit plugins are also pre-installed in addition to 45Drives-tools (command line tools). The 45Drives-stable repository is pre-enabled for keeping all of the 45Drives software packages up to date. Device Aliasing is also pre-configured and the results of our factory testing, as well as backups of configuration files used in our hardware specific cockpit modules, are saved to the ‘45drives’ user’s Desktop.
Thank you,
I bought the chassis + PSU option and threw in my old-ish X11SCH with a Xeon E-2224 (4c/4t) and 64GB of ram. I decided to try the software stack that they ship with the fully built as I saw it as a good challenge and learning opportunity outside of my comfort zone. It was just a matter of getting the right scripts and dependencies installed but it is working great. Just finished dumping 9tb of media to it from my USB backup of my Unraid server and it didn’t break a sweat.
Only downside for me and my configuration is that the 45Drives apps aren’t working at the moment. My MB definitely isn’t on the list of supported but I’m hoping there’s a way to at least get the chassis graphics working someday.