New server adventures

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Old friend, you are getting annoying

I’ve been using a Synology DS216+II since, well… 2016. It still serves me well, I’ve just upgraded its storage capacity the third time, now to 8TB, but it’s clear that it’s getting slow with the current workload I’m putting on it.

Currently it has to serve around 30 docker containers beside its standard NAS functions. I find that the 8 GB of RAM I put inside it around 2017 helped a lot and the bottleneck are the HDDs. They are constantly churning away, keeping my metadata and other really important stuff up-to-date, generating a lot of noise (you wouldn’t think but two WD RED+ HDD can put out a lot of sound).

In the interest of keeping the peace at home (my significant other complained about the noise and honestly I can understand her, though my main concern is not the sound levels but the constant wear on the disks) I decided that it’s high time to invest some money in a new toy.

So, I bought a new server

I looked around on the market with the following parameters in mind:

  • must be x86 based
  • at least 8 GB of RAM
  • capable of supporting SSD(s)
  • the less moving parts is the better

The first obvious choice was going with a Raspberry Pi, since I used them in the past and was somewhat satisfied, but they became insanely expensive and also ARM, which is OK, but I wanted x86.

So I kept looking and… enter the wonderful world of SBCs. Looking at a lot of YouTube videos, articles and reviews I finally decided to order a ZimaBoard, specifically the 832 version. They are giving 20% off every month on the 14th, if you are interested.

The order unfortunately was sent back on account of missing some customs document but ZimaBoard support was most helpful, they immediately shipped a new board using a different delivery company and I received the (second) server really quickly.

Getting to know each other

The ZimaBoard 832 has a 32 GB internal eMMC drive with CasaOS preinstalled, but I wanted to use Ubuntu. After reading up on the eMMC storage I decided that I’ll leave it alone in part to have an OS ready to go if something goes wrong but also because eMMC is slower than SSD of which I had one laying around. I had some trouble with the miniDP to DP cable I bought, it was not able to show text mode properly so no BIOS menu for you. I got around that by using the preinstalled OS to change the UEFI boot order using efibootmgr.

After that the boot from a pendrive containing Ubuntu 22.04 went without issues. I used mostly the default installation options and I got a working Ubuntu server in a very short time.

What to do with you?

After the installation I decided to move over some of my docker containers to their new home. I’m using docker volumes instead of bind mounts (mostly) so the process was kind of straightforward after I configured docker.

The speed difference was instantly noticable so I got greedy:

MOAR!!!1!

It can handle this load without any issues, but I kept a few containers on the Synology as well, but those are just for hardware monitoring, for example Scrutiny.

Conclusion

I’m very satisfied with my new server, it’s really surprising to see how much load a tiny, fanless thing can handle.

In the future I plan to use it to a lot of resource heavy stuff, like:

  • VirtualBox since on my M1 Mac it’s not so ideal (yet)
  • I want to play around with Ansible; so again, VirtualBox and Vagrant
  • Maybe install a Windows machine on it just for fun