Building a new server with a VM. OS & Resources?

[Spockmaster1701]

Hi everyone! I got an old server to play with and wanted to do a VM for EQEMU to run a server for my friend and I. I've never done this before so I had some questions if you could help me out.

Server specs:
HP Proliant DL360 Gen6 running Proxmox
2x Intel Xeon X5670 2.93 GHz CPUs (12C/24T total)
64 GB ram
2x 500 GB 7200 RPM HDDs, hardware RAID 1

1) Which OS should I use to run the server? I was leaning Fedora as I have the most experience with that.

2) What resources should I allocate for the VM? I figure not a ton as a server for 2 people probably won't use much, but I have no real idea what it needs.

3) Any other general advice for a first-timer? Thanks!

[joedit]

Hi Spockmaster,

By no means I am an expert, but I have been playing with eqemu for a bit, and you and I have similar use case. I mainly use it as a private server (private login as well) and occasionally open it up for my brother to login from externally.

I installed VirtualBox on Windows, and loaded eqemu on both Ubuntu and Debian. Personally I like Ubuntu better. 18.04 seems to be a stable version for eqemu, and I am running it on 22.04 as well and it seems stable so far. With VM, it is so easy to port the database to another instance for testing/messing around.

HW wise, I have allocated as little as 1 core and 3GB of RAM, and it runs fine. The installer seems to run fine with just 1 core and 2GB of RAM, but I had issues after starting the server. For my "production" setup, I allocate 2 cores and 8GB of RAM, and that is plenty for my brother and I, with about 48 tons total. I use a single SSD for both OS and EQEMU but I backup the DB once in a while - not best practice but good enough for my bro and I.

I tried really low end CPU as well, such as AMD Athalon, and the cheapest cloud service and those configs I mentioned above seem fine.

The install instructions are great and as long as you follow them, you should be fine. Enjoy!

**edit - sorry I called you Spockermaster earlier**

[Spockmaster1701]

Sweet, sounds like 2c/4t and 8 gb is ram should be more than enough. I'll probably still give Fedora a try first, every time I've tried Ubuntu on anything in the last 15 years it always screws something up somehow. I'll just need to figure out what version.

I also scrounged up another 2 500gb 7200 rpm drives so now I can do a 1.5 TB RAID 5 setup.

[Spockmaster1701]

Another question if someone can help: I've settled on Debian for it, should I do a gui install which will have more overhead, or just CLI?

[Huppy]

Originally Posted by Spockmaster1701

Sweet, sounds like 2c/4t and 8 gb is ram should be more than enough.

Some people get so concerned with HW resources for a simple home server, with a few players on it. Back in 2009, there was a thread, from someone running a public server, using 8 GB ram, running 77 static zones, etc, with a population on it. That person was nilbog, talking about the P99 server back then. But there has been a gazillion performance tweaks to the main Emu source code, since then.

You can find the thread here: http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=30097

As far as disk space, even my public server is only using 72GB total for both the Debian OS and the Emu server, which includes tons of database backups, logs, etc.

It takes very little for a server, with a few friends on it. Even Akkadius once posted on the old wiki, long ago, "It could run on a toaster".

[Spockmaster1701]

Awesome. GUI it is then lol

[Mewcenary]

I'm running in a Proxmox VM locally... 4 cores, and 4 gig RAM. 7 gig RAM in the /home/egemu directory with a base install.

I tried 2 gig RAM initially - however, this was not sufficient to do the server build.

[hayward6]

Originally Posted by Spockmaster1701

Another question if someone can help: I've settled on Debian for it, should I do a gui install which will have more overhead, or just CLI?

I've built, destroyed, rebuilt, and tweaked dozens of linux everquest emulator servers over the years, and the real decision with the gui or not, has nothing to do with hardware overhead. The server won't care. What I will say, is if you're new to linux at all, the gui will lessen the learning curve and give you some tools you may not know how to use from the command line. In my experience though, a non gui server will be more stable, I don't know if it's due to other applications I end up using because I have the desktop, or what exactly, but I have run a command line only server for months without touching it, where if I have a gui, it always seems to need to be rebooted more often.