Homelab

Because people get overly emotional about stupid things. Once you get a bit older and more mature, most people grow out of that. But for the ones who never do, they think their "way" is the "right way" and if you don't do it the "right way" ... "you're wrong."

At the end of the day, if what you're using meets your needs, then it's the right choice. Period. End of story.

I’ve run a Windows based home lab for around 10 years now. I use Windows Server as the OS tho and I use it as a Hyper-V server.

I do have a couple of Linux VMs running for things like Home Assistant, Frigate and TeslaMate, but everything else is in a Windows VM - specifically a Server Core VM.

Hyper-V itself is pretty capable when compared to the other options as well. Some of my VMs have PCI cards passed to them via DDA and I recently set up GPU partitioning to share a GTX 1650 between some of those Windows and Linux VMs

Theyre not. I wouldn't say they're the best, but If anyone says you shouldn't use Windows then they just don't know what they're talking about.

Windows has a lot of advantages. Ease of use, familiarity with most people, lots of features. It also has a lot of cons, lots of overhead (it takes more resources to do every task, less advanced features, features behind pay walls and licensing.

That being said it's a great place to start. You can run a windows server eval indefinitely by resetting the license every 90 days. You will learn a lot, and maybe upgrade later.

I switches my homelab server runni g fileshares, vms, etc from windows 2016 to proxmox wirh truenas fpr shares as an vm. Now my truenas is able to backup into the cloud, i am far more flexible from where i control stuff(rdp vs browser based) and i feel less locked in, into windows.

Windows update ia an absolute bitch unless you break it in registry. But then you don't get updates at all and have to fix it, update and break again. Rather unwieldy.

Also overall a lot of bulk. Perhaps if you run one of the light versions or heavily decrapified it...

For me windows constantly has inexplicable bugs and randomly corrupts itself wheras *nix and *BSD distros 'just work'. Plus no zfs on windows last time I checked

The answer is truenas.

Reboots every tuesday night because microsoft cant make a patch that doesnt require a reboot?

If all you're after is a place to store files, you're probably better off just buying another NAS. For people who want a hassle free time, they're a great option.

If you want to get a bit more clever with your setup including running applications on your server that serves your network (examples would be applications like Plex or network controllers), then opting for a dedicated server may be a better option. A dedicated server can be anything from a full rack mount server to a Raspberry Pi. What you get really depends on what you're trying to achieve, although the two things above are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

If you want a server and have absolutely 0 interest in picking up Linux, then Windows is a convenient option, with the stated downsides being listed by others. Linux can be difficult to get started with, but provides a lot of flexibility and stability once you get a good setup going. For example, on my server, I run a few commands to update the server itself and script to update all of my Docker containers, then it's done. I could probably set up those jobs as a cron so that I wouldn't ever have to touch it.

Windows storage spaces performance is far lower than what you get with Linux MD options. SMB in Windows performs better than in Linux, but over all my basic synology box shares files MUCH better than I could ever achieve with Windows. If you have 1gbps it doesn’t really matter but it’s much more important when you use 2.5-25 gbps networking. A windows Desktop also has a much wider attack surface than a specialized NAS appliance / hardened Linus server. It is so much easier to be safe with a Linux server. Lastly docker is a Lifesaver for the homelab vs local installations. The isolation is just amazing when you want to add a New app, get rid of an old one, or do an upgrade of an existing one.

I've run a NAS from Windows Pro (and still do, unfortunately). I also have a server running TrueNAS scale and another running Linux Mint for NAS. My TrueNAS and Linux Mint servers are much better at reliability and uptime. The Windows server has reboots often and sometimes services don't seem to launch before login. This could be due to configuration issues but it's harder to find resources since very few people use it like this. I only have it for backing up family photos to Backblaze for $7 unlimited plan. If Backblaze offered this on Linux I'd leave in an instant. Also, ZFS is a lot better than storage spaces.

Because until recent versions of Windows 11, HyperV and WSL were garbage. It's actually not a horrible option now. I actually use it as my homelab second "hypervisor" as it is always on anyway and it gives me a second always on server for redundant apps with almost no extra power usage.

When you come from the Windows desktop world, it makes sense to use Windows for a home server because it is what you know. In fact that is how I started out, then I moved to Windows server OSes. Eventually, I landed in the Linux space for both desktop and server.

Microsoft has a philosophy and way of doing everything, but it is their way. When we're talking about homelabs, we are talking about becoming admins of our own machines. Microsoft does not provide the level of flexibility that Linux does. For me the advantages of Linux over Windows are as follows:

• Cost: Microsoft licensing vs. free Linux licensing.
• Features: Linux has way more customizability than Windows ever has. Not to say that you cannot customize Windows, but it is clunky and will not be as granular as Linux. Native SSH allows me to connect to any of my machines and do things remotely from the command line. I spend so much more time in the command line now that I know how to use it. The GUI is often a crutch that has its place but still cannot hold a candle to the terminal.
• Old Hardware: I can run Linux on old hardware that Windows will choke on. This means I can use that old machine my neighbor is throwing out because it is so slow, to run my next project. My desktop is an HP 6300 (circa 2012) running Linux Mint with 14GB of RAM. For my day-to-day activities, this machine is awesome. I could never run Windows 10 or 11 on this box with the same ease of use. When this dies, I'll upgrade to another old machine. Maybe a 2019 version by then.
• System Resources: Linux needs little to run. Raspberry Pis run Linux like a champ and can pump out some serious services that would take Windows at least 3-4x as much to run just because of the OS alone.

All my machines in my family home are Linux-based at this point. So much can be scripted and controlled remotely from the terminal. Management is easier IMO. Cronjobs and aliases are a magical joy.

There are a lot of good responses here that I won’t reiterate. I will say that, in my own personal and professional experience, Linux simply is a far better server OS than any Windows OS.

That said, use what works for you. If you are experienced and comfortable with Windows, and aren’t too keen on climbing the Linux learning curve, then by all means use Windows.

My only suggestion would be to use Windows Pro (for RDP), or find a Server Standard license for sale at less than retail.

Once upon a time the home version of Windows didn't support any level of RAID.
I'm not certain what it supports now but I think you can at least do mirroring and maybe it can do rotating-parity (RAID 5).

I use windows, and its great.

Limited connections to smb to and from. License violation. Etc etc

because microsoft can decide to push a windows update out of nowhere that will whole your whole server hostage while it completes.

Client and server Windows are very similar since Server 2008. A client Windows has many limitations which are mostly non issues for home use.

The biggest annoyance for me is the update mechanism and how they tried to enforce it more on newer versions and even started crippling the Professional version in many ways. For some time I even felt the need to have a WSUS setup at home.

Many might also be tempted to run their Windows as kind of mainframe, like a jack of all trades. Virtualization, even in pure Windows environments, opens a lot of possibilities. If something sounds complicated in Windows, just setup a specialized VM to do it. Not that Windows can’t do something, but other tools might be more suitable for people that don’t work with Windows Server day to day. Like, I would never build a firewall with Windows, even though it is possible.

If you can get away with running hyper-v for your other needs/oses why not?

Do you mean windows server or windows 11 acting as a server.

If you already paid for it sure. But if you're thinking of getting windows server standard then that'll cost you vs a free nix based OS.

I haven’t seen a home share the single reason I think is the most important - if you’re using Linux as your server OS you are virtually guaranteed to find an answer to any problem you run into with almost zero effort. A lot of the answers for windows server related problems are going to be directed at professionals who are working in relatively complex IT organizations because these are the people using windows server.

You’ll find you can quite literally paste whatever error you’re getting on your Linux host into Google and someone will have seen the problem and there will 5 different solutions which will probably all work.

You’ll fine yourself in a situation where you say, “I wonder if I can do with my server,” and not only will someone have already done it before they’ll have a source code repository you can download their solution from and have it up and running in 10 minutes.

I know right now you’re at, “all I want to do is run a simple NAS,” but even just doing that you’re likely to run into some issue where a file copy won’t happen or a backup is failing and you need help. With Linux you’re likely to find a bunch of people who know how to fix it (or have already fixed it) and are willing to help you. If you’re using a windows server you’re much more likely to run into people saying, “idk bro - you should be using Linux.”

I run windows active directory and a few other windows features as I have a legit server 2019 licensee and it works quite well, including hyper-V.

But all my VM are linux based.

running windows for a year unattended isn't as easy as something like synology, which appears to be an embedded style linux variant. also, getting hot swap working properly plus disk management is more complex

It's not so much the Windows is a bad OS for running a NAS but more there are other purposely made OSes for NAS use that have better support for functions that a NAS is expected to runn.

It’s also artificially restricted as an SMB server. Has been since XP SP2.

Windows Desktop OS has the huge downside of forced updates these days. And they will just reboot, no matter if you want or not.

Server version is fine, you often even get it for free when you are a student for lab purposes, but it has way more overhead than Linux. 8GB is bare minimum for a Windows server, probably even more these days. If you run some services or even exchange / sql server, you need way more. A minimal Ubuntu runs fine on 512MB and Ubuntu is already quite high in memory usage compared to others. You can get away with even less of a footprint.

Most of popular apps are cross platform and at least have windows variants or at least have some great replacements, so it's hard to miss something (with few exceptions). Of course licensing violation it the thingg... but using server without gui can save a lot of resources and give a great experience of learning powershell (and how bad regular command like life in windows is...)

Are you going to use hardware RAID or do you have some specific software RAID server in mind (like unRAID)?

What got me interested in home-labbing was to be able to play with software RAID with a bunch of disks, NAS for home use and backing up, and some media serving.

In the end, what scratched my itch was the robustness of TrueNAS Scale (and ZFS itself) and it's user interface. I just love it.

But it does take some tinkering (and learning Linux) to get it working. But I wanted to remember some Linux and now it runs by itself.

The only real issue is reliability. Server versions are made to maintain as much uptime as possible, Windows Server updates don’t always require a restart (except Patch Tuesdays), whereas the desktop version almost always does and will do so without any warning. If you’re using it for home use, does that matter? Probably less so, considering downtime doesn’t cost you money it saves it if anything. Plenty of mom and pop offices use off the shelf desktop PCs as “servers” cause it’s more cost efficient.

It's actually fine.

Just make sure you enable and disable the right services on it and enjoy

Because of gatekeeping and snobbery.

My typical post to these questions is that I run the following without issue:

Windows 11 Pro for Workstations

Drivepool + Scanner + Snapraid is what controls my storage, which is currently something like 26x 20tb drives.

If you really have to I suppose Windows client versions will work as for servers. But Windows server version is much nicer to use.

Windows will use more resources idling than anything Linux, or purpose built will. You can do anything with windows as it turns out. After reading in r/homelab you might think, wow, no one runs a server on windows, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. TONS of enterprise runs on windows, and almost ALL small businesses runs on windows. It’s easy, simple, and there’s a cost for that. Windows Server is a purpose built windows version for being a server, there’s some more management built in, but really, at it’s core, windows 10/11 pro will do just fine for home use.

Use windows along side a linux distro. Then slowly learn to do some small things on linux. After a while you will get used to it. After some months you will wonder why you even used windows. I dont think I have to bring anymore arguments because the comment section did a good job why it’s better to ditch windows.

I love it when Linux dudes say “Linus uses less resources than windows” but have some dual cpu monster space heater server from 10 years ago that sounds like a vacuum cleaner. Your consuming NATRUAL resources bro lol. That said I totally use Linux visualized and on a few Pi’s But windows will always be my go to. Not because it’s better. It’s what I know waaaaaay n anything else.

Run what you know best in your crucial machines. Play around sand boxed area on non crucial hardware.

These are my personal reasons. I stress personal because everyone is different.

• it doesn't do what I tell it to do, but what Microsoft thinks I should want
• difficult to automate (I've been told this has been getting better, but I'm still not convinced)
• if things don't work as I expect, I can't look at the source code

In most cases I'm much less frustrated by using non-Windows alternatives in infrastructure. For example when I build Windows binaries, I use wine on linux.

Windows uses the NTFS File system and TrueNAS uses the OpenZFS file system which is superior to NTFS for storing your data. I'd do some reading on the OpenZFS file system to check out the benefits over NTFS. Running TrueNAS is really easy, you can check it out on Youtube, (installation and configuration videos). The book FreeBSD Mastery:ZFS (Michael W Lucas, Allan Jude) is also a good read on everything ZFS.

As most people said, I would go for something like TrueNAS, Proxmox or the best - Unraid that do cost a bit but will not break the bank - https://unraid.net/pricing

windows is a trash server os for use by people who should know better. pick a flavor of linux, or Open/Net/FreeBSD it’ll do a better job of serving your data.

ok ok, that was a little harsh, some of them do know and choose to take the wrong path.

Datacentre + 25 years of Linux expertise here:

Design the system around how you use your data, how important your data is, and where you want to back it up etc. Forget about chossing te platfor first..but..

Open source gives you WAY more options, Windows will just share files.

Eg Open souce NAS will ley you sync and aggregate all your cloud storage and backup apps as one single virtual cached storage directory all avaiable in your file explorer. No stupid clients and bloat. Open source will give you snapshots too. All sync happen in the backgroud with real intergrity checking. (For example, look at RCLONE as a wonderful onedrive client replacement for a virtual cloud filesystem, just run this on your NAS. )

Open source also lets you add unlimited Backblaze backup to you NAS without the business subscription (if you've got a few basic Linux skills.)

Open source also allows a wide array of virutual machines or containers for other handy home network utilities (think always-on pi hole, DNS add blockers etc)

I've been using linux as a daily driver now for over a year, due to qualms with the direction microsoft has taken, but thats beside the point really.

Yeah there is some stuff you need to learn if you wish to manually manage a linux install. But when it comes to something like truenas, and I assume unraid as well, for a simple use case you will never need to touch the internals. I run truenas, opnsense (bsd)m plex and proxmox. Those use either linux or bsd, and they are set up so I never need to even touch the internals (well proxmox I do some but thats from dealing with gpu pass through. Same with plex, the only thing I ever had to touch with plex was an fstab edit to mount my network drives which is a few lines of text in a file and you can find what to type online.

But say you use truenas, all you have to do is run the installer and you are ready to go with a stable system, the rest is managed through the gui. The only time I ever touched anything relating to the command line was to do a burn-in on my disks, and that's optional. If you do choose to run windows you will have to do more configuration, deal with more unwarranted issues from it being a desktop os, and in the end spend more time messing with it.

Homelab software has gotten to the point that 95% of what you would need to do involving the underlying system is abstracted away in a GUI.

Funnily enough, I made some measurements too on Windows power use. On an old Mac mini, it used less running native Windows than MacOS (less than 2w vs 3.5w).

I've 16GB / i7 Kaby Lake era laptops that will run Windows 10/11 powered up with an active (native) Intel LAN connected at 0.9w idle with services like MySQL installed and running. (0.9w with a USB meter, 1.2w at the wall). Windows is light now, people are still talking like we're in the Win95/XP days.

For those not familiar with the multitude of Linux services and config with simple needs, Windows is great.

Bad stuff: cost (thought there's legalish ways around that), it will reboot for updates if you're not on a server version (though click the delay and manually update once a month to avoid that), MS installing new stuff with those updates, the time it takes to strip out the baseline install stuff (some of the apps like Facebook, maps etc madly installed even on 11 pro).

I had my main server running OMV. I switched it to Win 11 Pro for ease of implementing WoL for powersaving. I use single plain disks and use snapraid for parity/redundancy (it's media updated maybe two or three times a months so snapshot then). That can do drive pooling too. LightsOut takes care of keeping the server on during media streaming.

You do you. If you don’t have the nous to manage a *nix based OS, go ahead and run Windows. We do this stuff for fun mate. As I’ve gotten older, I’m realising that I may as well leverage what I know to get there.

Because it is poop

I think a really major advantage to using Linux/BSD is that they are open and simple. Over time you gain an understanding and intuition about those systems that you are just not allowed to have with windows. You can recover from so many situations because you understand the problem and can come up with a solution. On windows you often would just have to cry and re-install… overwriting your data.