Can I use the same PC as a gaming rig and home server simultaneously?

[Ubernerd Lucas]

I'm currently looking at overhauling my home computer network. I need a better gaming rig for myself (currently use a laptop that's 3 years old) and also want a home server machine for storing media and maybe hosting some gaming servers for Minecraft or similar. I'm curious how practical it is for me to combine all my needs into a single machine; are there any major roadblocks in combining a gaming PC as a home server?

[Mio Rin]

I use my main rig as a server for everything, including hosting in-home streaming.

Technically, there are not many restrictions, although if the Minecraft server is online over the internet, you'll need to punch holes in your firewall to allow traffic to it (generally not the best idea without hardening, so putting it on an external hosting service (like, say, Digital Ocean) would be better).
As for serving media to the LAN, a VM (Virtual Machine) with FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault works fine.
(You can also just run Kodi/rygel or other media programs on the machine and tell them to serve the media over LAN, if messing with VMs is a bit too much to start with, but VMs help managing it all.)
You'll need a bit more RAM than usual, though. At least 1-2GiB per VM you'll be spinning up, in addition to what the host system and games need.
Another thing to keep in mind is read/write performance of the drives you'll be using.
With SSDs, it shouldn't be a problem, but if you're going to use "spinning rust" HDDs, you might want to look into RAID solutions.

It goes without saying that using Windows for this would be quite daft, considering the stability and cost issues it has, so a Linux based OS would be the better choice.
If you have Windows only games that you 'need' to play, setting up a VM with GPU-passthrough for 3D acceleration is quite doable, although still experimental, so YMMV with that.

I hope that gives you something to work with. :)


Have Fun! ^-^
Z.

[Ubernerd Lucas]

Originally posted by Zileene:

I use my main rig as a server for everything, including hosting in-home streaming.

Technically, there are not many restrictions, although if the Minecraft server is online over the internet, you'll need to punch holes in your firewall to allow traffic to it (generally not the best idea without hardening, so putting it on an external hosting service (like, say, Digital Ocean) would be better).
As for serving media to the LAN, a VM (Virtual Machine) with FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault works fine.
(You can also just run Kodi/rygel or other media programs on the machine and tell them to serve the media over LAN, if messing with VMs is a bit too much to start with, but VMs help managing it all.)
You'll need a bit more RAM than usual, though. At least 1-2GiB per VM you'll be spinning up, in addition to what the host system and games need.
Another thing to keep in mind is read/write performance of the drives you'll be using.
With SSDs, it shouldn't be a problem, but if you're going to use "spinning rust" HDDs, you might want to look into RAID solutions.

It goes without saying that using Windows for this would be quite daft, considering the stability and cost issues it has, so a Linux based OS would be the better choice.
If you have Windows only games that you 'need' to play, setting up a VM with GPU-passthrough for 3D acceleration is quite doable, although still experimental, so YMMV with that.

I hope that gives you something to work with. :)


Have Fun! ^-^
Z.

Thanks for the advice!

[initiaLiSeD]

Yes, no need to overcomplicate things, just get loads of HDDs, over Spec your CPU and get more RAM than you'd normally need in a gaming system.

Set it up like this:

SSD - OS and Core Games
HDD1 - SSD Back up
HDD2 - Games and local Media
HDD3 and up wards - Media open as a shared drive on the network

The only potential downside is that during gaming sessions the internal temperatures will go up which may reduce the lifespan of your HDDs so RAID it up.

My system has no problem allowing music or movies to stream while I'm gaming.

You may not be able to game locally while the machine is hosting games servers unless you go for a high end CPU with plenty of spare RAM capacity and run it in a VM with a couple of dedicated CPU cores and a chunk of RAM.