 So a few people asked about doing a home virtualization project, you know something small-scale and Not too big like the Dell R710 server we did and this is actually something I came up with Well because it was on sale. I won't lie and I have to Reference the paperwork. Okay, make sure get the numbers right. I we went over to Micro Center and they had a FX 8320 black edition AMD processor, which is a nice a core processor and actually does virtualization really well and Grabbed an ASUS motherboard happens to be a m5a7 8lm plus. They're pretty basic stuff here very consumer grade and It's really interesting because not only was it inexpensive. It was on sale We actually got this processor with the right gotta do a mail-in rebate, you know Microcenter, but the processor was 80 bucks and had a $40 mail-in rebate And I think they had a deal where you bought it as a combo at Micro Center and you got the board for like another $20 So really inexpensive very affordable. You can find some of these deals online as well And then we actually had this case Stephen bought it and never used it. Well, he did he nicked it at the top So it is used technically, but this is a thermal take the land light Landbox light case and this is actually going in my house So my server at home is a little dated and is well by pfs events at home is really old And my server that runs plex is barely able to keep up it It won't do anything more than 1080 and 1080s pushing it to the limit So I decided to build a virtualization what was then again for a couple reasons We'll explain here in the software demo of how this all works But I wanted to virtualize all the things I do so the servers at home And it's more than one now and this is gonna bring it down to one server What it's doing is I have stuff that runs backups. I have stuff that runs My plex and then I have a separate box for pfSense. This is all encompassing So we actually gonna boot Zen. We put a couple network interfaces in here So it's gonna connect to my cable mode at home And it's ideal is gonna have a virtualized version of pfSense inside of here So several boot up and we're gonna set it to auto boot auto start So, you know case power loss. Nobody's home. The kids will still have internet and the wife because that's important But I wanted something really compact and that should work with us So this is gonna be kind of a little project and I'm loaded all up and then I'll do the video Well, it's already built now. So I'm do the video now on how all the software works It's that's a that's the real nuts and bolts of all the virtualization is showing you how the software works and how We got pfSense virtualized and how you set that up There's some things you have to do and that's what we're gonna cover show you how to get all this working So well, here's the box. We got that part covered now Well, if you couldn't tell by the orange tiles That video was done about a month ago before we swapped the orange tiles down and that was on purpose Well, the tiles are on purpose and the delay. I shot the video because I wanted to put the machine in I wanted to use it for a while I wanted to load it all up and really test it and see if I had any hiccups problems or anything and It worked well But I'm gonna cover a couple little things related to it and making sure so if you decide to set this up in the same way I did at home where you virtualize pfSense Zen Orchestra plex and your backup server and on the other miscellaneous servers you do in your home on a less Lesser powered machine. I'll go over how I did all that and set it up. So I'm gonna start with What's right here? The internet comes in. There's only two network cards in his virtual machine the Landbox that I showed you in the beginning here my internet provider currently wide open West They bring in the internet and it goes to the WAN port on there now I labeled it WAN. I chose one of the network interfaces as WAN I chose the other one as LAN when I set up Zen server So when I loaded it the first interface it found I set to be the management port to manage then And this to be like basically a second network card inside the machine And the only thing attached to that network card is the WAN side of pfSense That's it. So in in worries of if someone was on the internet could they get to the management side? No, it's physically not connected It's connected to one network interface card and that network interface card is then mapped to the pfSense machine From there pfSense hands out DHCP addresses to the LAN network Now the LAN network is dual. You have the internal sides and the external side It's physical one, but it goes in and out the same way So you attach things to that same network interface the Plex server I have the backup server ends an orchestra all on this LAN part And then externally just a standard dumb switch no smart switch no managed switch Goes out of there goes to my unify APLR and there's my Chromecast Laptops phones. There's a couple Chromecasts out there These are the wireless devices and of course the kids got phones and I didn't bother duplicating But there's tablets as well or any internet device. We don't have any IOT devices in the house so it really is just laptops and tablets and Chromecasts and things connected to it for the wireless and one friends come over Now the things that are hardwired are the gaming system always hardware gaming system best way to do it So if you're having lag issues, it's not because of interference. So the gaming system we have is which is also the only Windows machine I own be well Linux gaming whole other topic It runs a lot of games doesn't run all the games So the gaming system is hardwired in and I have the Chromecast ultra which supports network Jack Nets because of 4k content. It works really good. And I you may have noticed I have an APLR That does not support AC. I'm just not worried about that extra speed Going out, but it does cause some hiccups occasionally if you were trying to stream 4k content to a Chromecast They recommend a faster connection I like a hardline connection because it is a much more immediate connection I've tried both and each Chromecast none of these are connected 4k TVs Matter of fact one of them is an older TV my son has that's 720. So it's just not it doesn't matter works great So there's two Chromecast there one Chromecast or a big TV in our living room And that's the Chromecast ultra and then the servers running inside here the backup server just runs syncing and syncs all the data from my network at my office over to my house for a backup now Being that it's business data and things like that one we encrypt before it leaves second when we landed on here It's also encrypted on a hard drive So if you were to physically steal my Zen server when these boot up They're using Lux encryption and you have to manually type in the password now This is done inside of the virtual machine has nothing to do with Zen at all It's the way I set up my Debian machines now that being said will show the usage on it It's very minimal amount of RAM and processor power at all it takes and this actually allows for hourly syncing of our Critical data to this via syncing via VPN So everything's locked down and secure and that's really all this box does but of course, you know Something could happen someone could take something which is why I use encryption now we encrypt it before it leaves We actually the way we do the encryption for our database backups We encrypt it before it ever gets off of the servers that run the database Which they're locked down they need their locks encryption as well just like the free NAS has its own encryption I believe GLI encryption. We use that as well. So everything top-to-bottom Security is really really at the forefront of all this So even if you were able to get the password of this you would only find more encrypted data I just wanted to cover that a lot of people asked me about that and I've talked about it And maybe it needs its own video just talking about top-to-bottom, you know encrypting each step of the way So that being said it doesn't use a whole lot of horsepower. It runs syncing did a whole video on syncing still using it I think that was like a year or two ago. I did the video it still hums along really well and Any what it does is you take two folders you point them at each other Picture a self-hosted version of Dropbox if you're not familiar syncing, but I'll leave a link in a video Leaking into description so you can go watch the syncing video if you want to understand it But that's how all the data gets over to here And it's really lightweight because this only has 512 ram assigned to it I think it's using not even a quarter of that. I think it uses a hundred megs of Memory less Meg not gig hundred megs half a gig of ram assigned to it now The Plex here is a little bit different story I found with some of the larger content once you get over and this is it once again running Debian Plex seems to want about Gig a ram for 1080p 60 frame a second content It has a little bit of a struggle with that processor with some and it comes down to how it's encoded 4k content So I have two gigs assigned to it and it does work depending how it's encoded it'll play 4k But it has no problem playing any 1080 content that actually works great. No that barely even sweats the processor but it is a Substantial four times more data when you're trying to run 4k I don't really do much 4k content matter of fact I don't really do much what Plex doesn't have a lot of storage because there's just a few things on there And of course then orchestra. I like Zen orchestra because it gives me a nice Web interface to manage all of this now important side note here when you virtualize PF sense and PF sense is your DHT PC server because my internet provider is in a bridge mode It provides nothing it bridges it over and gives me one public IP address Which you obviously don't want assigned to the land So one of the things I'm going to cover is how we have the startups working because if the Zen server reboots The Zen server has a static IP so that's out of the way, but if you have other devices on your network that are not Don't have static IPs They have no idea how to work at all and I actually let PF sense hand out all the DHT P addresses So I have it set up to boot up PF sense In the case of power failure unattended. This is not a checkbox and vent server It's adding an RC local from the command line to it with a script that I will also leave in the description below So it's an open-source script believe I got it off github. I'll leave the github link if I get it off github If not, I'll just I'll show you the script. It's really simple But you have a startup script that kicks off to automatically start the boxes upon power failure of Zen Zen will do this in a clustered mode, but the default action is not doing it So that's how this is set up. So on reboot it will automatically bring up PF sense again And you have to set a delay in there and I'm going to show you what that is when we get to that part so that's the pretty basics of it now we're actually going to show you what the system looks like and The one thing you have to do to PF sense that one thing you should know Don't don't click away folks about to set it up. It's the way you set up the networking in it So let's jump over to PF sense now All right So the one trick that I really had to do here the problem I ran into and had to fix was the network performance was terrible and This was I may I think I mentioned this in my virtualization lab tutorial But I'm going to reiterate it again And this may be different for different things or if I loaded the drivers for Zen it would fix this now what happens is PF sense wants to talk directly to the hardware. That's fine. This is virtual hardware So being virtual hardware We had to check a couple boxes here and you can see just make it look like this The hardware checks some offloading hardware TCP segment offloading and hardware large receive offloading is All set there now the other instance where you run into this problem is going to be if you have an incompatible or not fully Compatible I should say network card with PF sense You will have to check these boxes because it says that like for example with some real tech cards is noted in here Either and what it does is a hard load hardware offloading some of the processing the problem is because it's a Emulated network adapter. This is the only trouble I've had at all running this in here now that being said This PF sense is not super memory intensive I only have one and a half gigs of memory because there's only eight gigs total in this whole virtual server So I got one and a half gigs assigned to PF sense and this is running and I'm gonna be doing a video on this soon This is part of the reason I'm doing it the house too. This is running Snort it's running What else we have in here? We got the snort. We have the traffic shaping with the I'm sorry the PF blocker and G's in here I've been doing a lot of testing and I've been testing it at home So I can get you guys some more data of like home use and things like that because there's so much more going on in our Network to play with it and I'm less worried about accidentally screwing something up at home Because it won't show my business down So I'm got some more videos that are up and coming on this but all these things run perfectly fine we'll make a couple processors assigned to them and now I'm going to jump over to the System itself on Zen. I'm gonna use screen connector remote into my computer at home to show the Zen running Directly on there and if you're wondering what you're seeing here This is the remote support tool we use called screen connect and what screen connect does is Allows us to remote into machines and it's convenient. So I'm using it for my machine now, too Now the notification you see here is because I did not update this to the 7.3 version of Zen And I'll talk about that well real briefly here. It used pricing a video I did complaining about some of the things and features they took away from it It's also tricky because I can't load it on here Because it needs internet access to load and it wants all the virtual machines shut down So I'm actually if I do decide to load it I have to copy it on to like a thumb drive and install it because it won't have it has to have no virtual machines running before It'll start the download So that is at least one hiccup I've run into because once you shut down PF sense. I have no internet access So let's take a look here at the networking. We'll start there I do have this on here, but I'm actually not using it right now Tom's land of Zen where you can create internal ones. I got a whole tour of that on my Virtualization of how you can create internal only networks, but I'm actually not using any that for the virtual machines Here is Nick zero and Nick one and I added a description to cable modem So the only thing the only virtual machine connected to Nick one is PF sense It has two network interfaces assigned to it. So if you look over here at the PF sense machine We go to networking. We see two interfaces land when now when like I said, it's the one that connects to the cable modem So the other virtual machines. Let's go to my backup server Only have one it's attached to land Here's my Plex server go to networking and it's attached to land So each one of these is only attached to where they're supposed to be attached Now let's get into details. I think I can zoom in a little bit here Because I want to talk about the performance. We're going to jump over to here and this machine's been in for about a month Let me zoom out maybe just a little bit. So now we're looking at some of the performance This machine's been on and I got it zoomed to your month so you can see January back to December It was right around just about 30 days ago that I loaded this So here's where the peak is for the rights back and forth to the hard drives Where I set up all the virtual machines and loaded them after that not much at all Because it just doesn't take a lot of power to run these and that was kind of a nice thing because I had these as separate machines and Obviously my closet like was warm all the time where I kept them and the power bill would suffer from it So being able to consolidate everything down to one machine makes it really easy now Well, the machine I didn't mention but I just said the video on I set up the pie hole at home So me scoot this over a little bit And that's the one extra server you see here is the piehole server And it's another example why like this having this virtual server at home. I just can spin something up My kids help our guinea pigs for testing how good the piehole was working and are like a real-world usage We used it for a couple weeks and that's how I generated the data for that video But once again, we look at the performance specifically on that It takes nothing matter of fact only had 512 assigned to it now. Let's look at some of the individual servers Here's the backup server like some of it's actively backing up right now and let's zoom into like the One hour because we do hourly backups. Here's those little bumps from the hourly backup. It almost uses can't even Tell but it doesn't look like maybe a couple percent of the CPU power And when you look yeah 6.3% is what we're hitting to back up that nerves about I don't know quite a few gigs with the files I don't have the exact number, but it sinks them it pulls it through our databases aren't that big So it's not not too much to consolidate. It's just important stuff performance of here Running all the things that are running The only thing that might slow it down if you're downloading when I download like a Linux Just show it home, and I'm using a torrent. I'll watch some spikes on here You'll see little peaks here and there and that's where I did that where you see the network performance Once again though with four CPUs assigned to CPF sense Nothing is fully saturating it or using full performance now the only exception to that's going to be when you look here is the You see a lot more usage on this system here I was playing around with it trying to play some 4k content It peaks it out right away, but 1080 plays perfectly fine and the Tom's house server Mostly is use replicas few miscellaneous things I have on there, but it's mostly use-replex and works wonderful for it So 1080 content doesn't stress it plays great. No no issues at all on there Now the important part though something want to talk about here is going here we're gonna go over to the council I'll open it up in putty All right, here's that really simple script and like I said I'll make sure there's a link to this below or linked to where it was or you can get you a copy of this script Really simple you put the names in here So it says names equal and the do kid do I care about is pf sense and XO a and VMs display log file matches you ID you give the UIDs of the machine names Which is easy enough to get me switch over to that screen? If you look at any virtual machine There's the UID for each one So you take the UID of the virtual machine and you can actually just copy it and There it is and then you tell it to auto start the VMs and that's all the script really does It's pretty straightforward. Nothing real exciting about it. It has a VM startup log It throws this information in here auto starts VMs, but where do you put it? So the way I set it up was And we'll just set they go it's in. Oops. So you go over to here to Etsy Rc.d and if I do an LS here, I created this file December 9th. That's when I set this up RC local and all that file does we're gonna go ahead and get this is It's a generic RC local file I had an ad sleep 360 because it would init RC local a little bit too early sometimes before the storage is Ready, so three three hundred sixty seconds is plenty of time for the machine to settle down Be completely happy after a rebooting case anything went wrong You know doing a disc check and things like that then it just goes and runs start VMs dot sh That's it. So this file in RC local boom. You can do this now. I found this in the Zen forums This is not like unheard of knowledge to speak I didn't invent this at all and it's really simple and it even tells you what to do here It says make sure you run see each mod plus x because First thing Tom didn't do is read this and then forgot to set it executable just an oversight on my part But it works perfectly fine I have pulled the plug in a machine a couple times to make sure it would completely come up and that's great Other side of it though when you're running updates and you want to run the update reboot and run another update You forget and then the machine starts in the middle of you trying to run an update and you get other errors So think about this if you're running updates Make sure it's in maintenance mode. So these won't the machines won't start when you do that But other than that, it's not been a problem at all for doing The things that I do on at home and having a home server. It's been really handy Virtualizing PF since it's been fun because I can do custom things and you know before I make any crazy changes when I'm turning things on I just run make a snapshot real quick and go okay I'm going to change this or change that and you make a snapshot of it Make those weird changes or it's a test that lead to more videos and it gives me a better than setting up a More sterile lab environment here I get a whole environment of what in the world are my kids going to load on their laptop And what is it all going to do and everything else? So it's kind of it's kind of fun being able to do this At the home level so all my home servers and they're easy to access The other reason I use Zen server and I I got to update this one to the same version I have here, but it should work perfectly fine for importing VMs is in the event something absolutely horrible Where to happen to my building to my business or anything like that? I want to make sure I have a Zen server at the ready. So I have a spare Zen server here So we have two of them one's not even plugged in It's just I turn it on I load the updates and I keep it turned off It has its own local storage because I constantly back up every weekend With all my backups, I have always recent copies of everything So if I need to restore a server, I can restore a server So if something happens to the building something tragic a flood of fire, whatever the unexpected I keep extra copies of my servers that take them each weekend home on an encrypted drive So I can really quickly restore and if I had to run my business from my house with my Zen server I could I could restore, you know, some of the critical things we may need And make things happen like even we self-host even our remote support tools So we would just change the DNS entries to point to my house when we would grab our laptops around the table and plan This is as part of the disaster recovery planning is having a plan B for this of course because I'm exporting them And are in the standard format, which is something I like about Zen I could upload them to a cloud hosted provider as well and not have them in-house So there's other plans other options But that's it for running a virtual server and at my house and how I got it set up If you like to count here like to describe if you have questions about this project Let me know leave them in the comments below or join our forums where I can hopefully be more interactive and answer questions about it All right, thanks