I wanted to take a couple of minutes and post an update about my experiences with MineOS. It’s worth noting that I started working with MineCraft because my 11 year old son is really into it. He started middle school this year and the word was that there was going to be a MineCraft club. No club so far, but man, I’ve learned a lot in the last month or so.
First and foremost, I’ve now got three servers running that appear to be stable. Up to last night I was having real issues with keeping things running for more than an hour or so.
Hardware:
Dell Poweredge 2900 III ($60 off eBay! plus a couple or three drives and some memory: about $120 all in.)
2x Xeon 2GB Quad Core
48GB RAM
2x74GB 15K SAS in a RAID 1 (OS)
6x143GB 15KSAS in a RAID 5 (/var, /home, /usr)
Various external HDs. (Total storage is about 3.25 TB right now as I shuffle things around from my old Raspberry Pi server.)
Duel Ethernet, plus a DRAC!
Software
Ubuntu 14.04
LAMP
VirtualBox 5
MineOS NodeJS
My original intent was to run VMs under Ubuntu 15. I tried several versions of MineOS but I wound up having issues with MineCraft in all of the VM iterations and dumped that idea last night. I’m not positive, but I think it had to do with the CPU virtualization in that I’m still running a couple of VMs right now, serving web pages with minimal overhead and having no problems. I will probably keep my web services on one in the long run.)
Yesterday, fed up with “Daddy is the modded server working?” “I think so, son.” , I moved the Minecraft VM onto the actual drive and voila: stability ensued. All three of my servers have been up and running since then. No real load test yet, but I’m not anticipating troubles.
Anyway, FWIW, assuming that I’ve got everything set up correctly, you can see the server status page at minecraft.echo4golf.com. Feel free to pop in and play for a bit.
Base server:
Self built server with standard PC harrdware
intel Core i7 3,10 GHz
32 GB RAM
LSI MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i SGL
HDD setup:
RAID 1: System HDD : 2 x 500GB Disks.
Running on notherboard SATA ports
(Not quite true… Running on only one now, since the system kept crashing with mirroring active).
RAID 6: Data HDD: 5 x 4TB Disks:
Running on MegaRAID card
(yup, loads of space, but I’m not only running Minecraft from here…:D)
OS: Windows Server 2012 R2
Web services: WAMP
Virutalization: Virtualbox, with VMbox service addon, and phpVirtualbox running on WAMP for control panel
Minecraft installation:
Running on VM under Virtualbox
1TBdisk available (extended with CIFS and network storage from Windows Server)
OS: Ubuntu 14.04
MineOS Node
Currently running 6 server; 2 xpocketmine, 2x Craftbukkit, 1xVanilla, 1xFTB_Infinity.
All server files are run on VM internal disk (the 1 TB)
All archives are saved driectly to a network disk on Windows server (using CIFS, and mounting a shared folder in the location of the Archive directory)
The server is running happily.
I have had to modify “mineos.js” in one location to allow for the archives to be stored on a CIFS mount;
var filename = ‘server-{0}{1}.tgz’.format(self.server_name, strftime(’%Y-%m-%d%H:%M:%S’));
was changed to:
var filename = ‘server-{0}{1}.tgz’.format(self.server_name, strftime(’%Y-%m-%d%H_%M_%S’));
Since windows File systems do not accept ‘:’ as a part of a filename.
This is cool. Thanks for sharing. 20TB? Wow! I might change out the SAS drives for larger ones at some point but I don’t think I’ll go that big. One of the things that I like about my server is that it’s old enough that parts are dirt cheap. I think I want to upgrade the processors next. It maxes out at at 3GHz, I think, and that will make a difference.
I’d be very interested in seeing other hardware configurations that folks want to share.
The Beast: Bare Metal Dell PowerEdge 2950 III, 2x 64bit Xeon Quad core 2.33MHz, 1333MHz Front Side Bus, 16Gb RAM w/ 1ea SSD and 5ea SATA hard drives booted from an internal USB Thumb Drive.
OS: Headless VMware ESXi 6.0, Turnkey LAMP console administered by VMware vSphere Client 6.0 on an old Win7 laptop w/ Opera, Firefox and IE for the MineOS WebUI and SFTP with CuteFTP and Filezilla to Root around in Archives.
Servers Built: MineOS-Python on Ubuntu 14, MineOS-Python on LAMP, many flavors of 32 and 64bit on Turnkey Lamp distros all the while migrating/ importing our favorite MineOS servers running Steve’s World, Feed The Beast and some of JayMontana36’s great work (Tip of the Hat), to name a few worlds. Many hours of joy had by one and all and some new gray hair!
