What's the BEST home server operating system?

Hello everyone, I'm Christian and in this video I want to talk about one of the challenges I had once I started building my own

home

lab and tried to find a good

operating

system

that I wanted to run on my

home

server

s because when you are Starting to look into

server

system

s, you'll quickly discover that it's quite overwhelming how many different solutions there are. Yes, we have all these different Linux distributions, we have virtualization technologies, Nas software, etc., there are literally hundreds of viable options you can choose from. Even for an experienced technician, it's sometimes a challenge to figure out

what

the different capabilities and limitations of these systems are today, with all the other complicated things we have, like Docker or Kubernetes automation, it's really gotten easier, as well.

what

I thought Let's look at 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 solve different tasks like storage virtualization and automation, and what I think is the

best

opera training. systems for these specific use cases because yes, you can already guess if there is not this one solution that is

best

in all situations, that is what I can tell you from the beginning, but I still want to give you some guidance on which

operating

system systems and solutions that exist for home servers and what might be good in one particular setup and another you might have better alternatives, so it will be an interesting session.

Let's get started and talk about some of the options you have for running a home server. Server, this video is powered by teleport, a free and open source proxy that helps you securely authenticate across your IT infrastructure such as Linux servers, databases, kubernetes clusters, web applications or remote desktops . You can easily protect your accounts with modern security features such as two-factor authentication or a password lock and access your services through the browser or the Seal Eye tool with audit logging and session recording and, best of all, it's completely free in the community version, so you can download it and run it in your entire home lab or If you want to use it in your company, Teleport offers many professional features such as single sign-on auditing and more, it is a great tool, so check it out.

You'll find a link to their website in the description of this video. Well, first I want to talk about what I call the classic server operating systems, yes, Linux and Windows, and let's start with Linux because I think that's what most of you would probably like to run in some home lab and that, For good reason, Linux is just an Amazing OS for home servers because it's free and works on almost every system, no matter if you want to build a large server with a lot of stored computing power, a small energy-efficient machine for your home, or just a small Raspberry Pi Linux.

It just runs on all of these devices, is very stable, and you will find tons of free open source apps. You can create all kinds of scenarios, like running network storage, installing a web server or databases, running virtual machines, the sky is the limit and that's why I also installed Linux on my first home server here, so I It seemed like a perfect solution and I can tell you that it is absolutely amazing from an experimentation and learning perspective, of course when we talk about Linux we are really just referring to the kernel letter. Yes, if you want to run and install Linux on your home server, you will have to choose from hundreds of different pre-built software packages, so-called Linux distributions, and this is where it gets a little complicated because when you ask people.

What is the best Linux distribution to run a home server? You'll probably get many different answers. Some people will say it's Debian. Others will say that Ubuntu is the best distribution. Others will tell you it's Red Hat or Fedora because it's a very subjective question. In the subcommunities it is even a controversial topic and you will see that there are always people who claim to have found the best Linux distribution to run their desktops on home servers and in a few months they completely switch to another one which is from then on the Linux lot. this split, yeah, so I'm not going to continue this discussion, yeah, I would say that there is no one Linux distribution that is best for everyone, it just depends a lot on your personal needs and preferences, 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 Ubuntu because for me umantu is still my main Linux distribution and I always recommend it because it is great for beginners and professionals. Also, I know people have a lot of different opinions about Linux distributions, but I honestly don't care. Ubuntu has been great for me on all my stores for almost 15 years and since that hasn't really changed over time, you can probably guess. It is a good and reliable option to run your servers. In fact, in recent years, since containerization emerged, choosing a specific Linux distribution has an underlying system and has become less important due to many of the workloads running today. on servers they no longer run on the main OS when I think about it.

I'm barely managing Linux these days, mostly just running a few updates and a couple more packages, the actual applications, the workloads I'm running. mainly in a container that is completely isolated from the other packages running on the host and here the Linux distribution doesn't really make a big difference because containers are standard in all of these solutions, regardless of whether you are using Red Hat. openshift or canonicals micro kubernetes on Ubuntu Ranches k3s Docker or podman which Linux distro you are using for your home servers doesn't matter as much as you might think, however, if you still want to have a comparison on some great Linux distros for home servers .

I made a video about this in the past where I go a little deeper into actual Ubuntu Debian difference references and some other options, so if you want to check it out, I put your link in the description of the video and by the way because we're just talking about my other videos if you haven't already like this and subscribe to my channel it would be very kind because it really makes a difference in the YouTube algorithm. topic, in a nutshell, Linux is awesome, especially if you like container kubernetes clusters, but even if you don't, yes, it's a great choice as a home server OS and you can probably pick up one of the popular distributions of Linux that exist. good for servers and then install it on your machine and simply deploy your workloads on it, but this is just one of the options for running a home server.

There are many other solutions and configurations that I want to talk to you about, for example Windows is also an option, some people now will say, forget about Windows, but I always like to be a bit of a counterbalance against this Linux Fanboy, not because Windows remains the most used operating system in the cobot world, that does not necessarily make it a good operating system. option for home server of course if you like home labs and techy things you should keep an eye on windows server and for some people it may be good if you don't like being in a terminal or if you have a case of specific use maybe a couple of applications that only run on a Windows OS then Windows Server may be an option, however I understand that Windows Server might not be the preferred system to run a home server for most people Yes, because it requires a license. and overall Linux is IMO the better choice in a direct comparison here, but it's still a good side project to take a look at, maybe not as your housekeeping OS, but to run in a virtual machine, which by the way brings me to the second group of solutions that I would like to talk to you about because if you are like me and 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's why you should really use visualization whenever possible it allows you to run multiple operating systems on a single machine so you don't need to choose one operating system and that will be your main forever, always You can try new things like different Linux distributions that we just talked about or install a Windows server on it, there are so many cool things that you can all do with virtualization and although you can run virtual machines on a Linux distributions like Ubuntu, in my opinion there are better platforms built for that one task because running a virtual machine management requires a ton of different software and packages that you need to install and manage, you need a virtualization layer obviously maybe you would like to have an interface to manage and easily create new virtual machines or you need to take snapshots, set up backups and monitoring, and all that can be quite a pain to set up yourself on Linux, trust me because I've tried it before, that was actually the main reason why I left to run Ubuntu directly on my home servers.

Hardware Software once I started to delve a little deeper into managing virtual machines or storage pools with the ZFS file system. I found that setting it up myself on a Linux distro like Ubuntu requires a lot of extra work. and skills, and you can really save yourself a lot of headaches and trouble by first choosing one of the hypervisor platforms that you install on your home server, which usually comes with a nice interface and all the other tools, such as managing backup storage and networks, and then just run a Linux server or maybe a Windows server on top of it;

However, this obviously raises another question: which hypervisor platform is best for your home servers and I'd just like to cover a few solutions I've been working with. in the past and I also want to tell you what I am using now, for example, there is Microsoft Hyper-V, which by the way is not free and you can use it to run virtual machines with all kinds of operating systems, like like Linux servers or other Windows servers , I worked a bit with Microsoft Hyper-V at the beginning of my IT apprenticeship. Yeah, we had a couple of small and medium-sized businesses where we were just using this as an operating system to virtualize multiple Honestly, I don't really like it because compared to other hypervisor platforms, Microsoft Hyper-V is a little limited in terms of overall of features and it's really annoying to manage what I've also been working on during that time was VMware on the free e6i Hypervisor which you'll probably see a lot in the enterprise field in a data center for example, but also in smaller environments you can work with a free VMware e6i hypervisor.

It is a great solution for virtualization, however, I must say that it is also a system. which I personally wouldn't run on a home server because many of VMware's advanced features are licensed and cannot be used in the free version of es6i, for example I like to automate the deployment of my virtual machines with terraform and this requires correct access to the hypervisor API that is not supported in the free version of e6i and I just don't like wasting time with these complicated licensing issues or just other smaller things like the old clunky web UI, scared me. away from VMware a long time ago, in my opinion there is a better alternative - hypov, there is a platform that is perfect for personal home servers and you can get it completely free for most of you, it won't be surprising because it is proxbox. which is an open source solution based on Linux and KVM, it allows you to visualize all types of workloads, yes you can even create high availability clusters with it, it has some cool features for managing storage and containers and it is really great with automation, for example.

I recently made a video on how to automate virtual machine deployments with proxmox terraform and Pekka, where all my VMS are now defined as code allowing me to spin up new servers with pre-installed packages and configurations in just a few seconds. absolutely amazing, it also has an API or metrics logging functionality 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 it to create new virtual machines, add containers or storages, manage backups and snapshots, all of that is really very simple and once you start playing a little else with it, you will love all the advanced features you can use like the cloud. in it I create VM templates and deploy them via API the whole time I have used proxmox it has not disappointed me so when I need to choose a favorite OS for my home servers I would say it is proxmos there is only one problem.

You might run into problems when you try to set it up in a smaller home lab because it doesn't work on arm-based CPUs like a Raspberry Pi. I have seen that there is a similar project called pymox, but I have really tried 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 in that particular case, if you just want to start building a home lab with a Raspberry Pi, you should still go with Linux. distribution something like Ubuntu skip the virtual machine layer and just deploy your workloads in containers, but I can't really see any other situation where you wouldn't want to run proxmox on your home servers, maybe just one more and that's when he doesn't mainly like virtual machines, maybe he plays with it sometimes, but his focus is more on storage and he would like it. have a more complete all in one solution for your home server that is easy to manage and this is the third set of systems you could use in my opinion and this one uses a NASA system as the veracity scale even though the idea original of a system like this is to build network attached storage, it has become much more than that, for example I recently made a video on true net scaling saying this could be the perfect OS for Home Server because it doesn't It's just a btw, you can still build a great storage server with it.

You can group multiple hard drives into a redundant, high-performance cluster and use it as one machine, but it also allows you to easily run and configure hundreds of useful applications and packages that you would normally run on a home server, just take a look at the amazing graphics project real ones created by the trunes scale community that allows you to easily create new applications on this Nas system with just a few clicks. I think they just released a newer version of that and you can create your own private storage with nexcloud or run Home Assistant for smart home automation, a Plex Media Server.

There are so many interesting graphics and useful occasions of Home Server applications that you can surely do too. similar stuff too in proxmox or with linux distro like Ubuntu, but you might still need to configure some things on your own, yes, and you don't have this worry-free solution in a coherent interface like in trueness, so that's in my opinion, best possible use case for Journal scale if you want a single home server where you can securely store all your data, run some apps for self-hosting, maybe just run a VM or two to try new things once in a while from time to time, but it is not like that.

You don't really need advanced virtualization features, you just want to have a solid and reliable all-in-one system that is easy to manage in a web interface, then Junior Scale will be a great option in direct comparison to Proxbox. You can see what the differences are. fine-tuned VMs as they may not have as great features as in proxmox, it is missing some automation features like API and terraform integration, but on the other hand it can also do some interesting things on a real net scale that you can't do it natively in proxmox, so what should I say at the end?

Yes, it's not always easy to decide between all these different solutions, like I said, it depends a lot on your personal preferences, your use cases and your skills, if I were to start with my entire house now. lab project again and would need to choose an operating system to start. I would choose proxbox as my primary OS to run a home server and then start exploring other options, such as running one or more Linux servers while VMs test and experiment. different Linux distributions and containerization with Docker and Kubernetes, you probably know all this from my other videos, but if you are not so interested in these advanced things, you can also go for nas system like trueness as your main operating system 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 am running a proxmox server in my home lab which is obviously to run my virtual machines on these virtual machines, I am mainly running Ubuntu Linux. for Docker and Kubernetes and then I also have a large storage server running through it scale.

That's why I store all my data to make YouTube videos or any other project files. By the way, in the next video I must give you a complete tour. from my home lab and show you what devices I'm actually running on my server rack because there are a few more, but I think that's it for this video because I know that was actually a lot of things even if I didn't. covers half of the other options and alternatives you could also use to run on your home server. I guess a lot of people in the comment sections aren't going to ask why you chose proxmox and why you chose right, what's up with the world of open media or what? about xcpng and such, yes, I know there are many other platforms, systems and options, however, at some point you have to stop looking for alternatives and go for the solutions that are most useful to you because otherwise you will end up trying hundreds of systems different. and softwares and solutions that do the same thing and get you nowhere in ID, but still there are some options for running a home server that probably make more sense than others and I hope this video was a little helpful in getting a better idea. idea of ​​that and yes, these were the best operating systems and platforms I have used so far on my home server.

Please tell me what you think about these solutions or what else you are using. Maybe I missed something important. I think I probably did it anyway. I really like hearing from you and as always, thank you all for watching. I'll see you in the next tutorial or video, we'll see, bye.