Home Server – Minecraft & VPN

A while ago I was asked to transfer all the files and photos from a Desktop to a Laptop. My Aunt and Uncle were downsizing the daily driver they had. Part of this was that once all files were transferred and they were happy, I could take the Desktop to use however I wished.

WireGuard VPN:

Initially, I had no use for this computer and left it in a cupboard gathering dust. One day I asked myself the question “Why don’t I move my VPN to this computer I have that is sitting doing nothing”. The next day I did exactly that, I backed up all my VPN settings and started up the Computer. Installed Ubuntu Server, set a static IP Address, Installed the VPN software I used on my Raspberry PI and restored the settings.

Minecraft Server:

Months later I decided to host my own Minecraft Server, I upgraded the amount of RAM. Then I pulled out an old CPU, it was marginally better than the Duo core I had currently installed. Everything was going well, performance was good, VPN was up and working. I would really recommend setting up a Minecraft Server for both Bedrock and Java Editions. Learning the basics behind the full setup is definitely worth the experience.

Unfortunately, the server was short-lived, a few months later the motherboard died. I began looking around for some replacement parts as I thought about upgrading but, another thought came to mind.

The Upgrade:

My thought was, “Why don’t you use a Type-1 Hypervisor?”. What an idea this was, I could set up several Virtual Machines to run anything I choose. Close to Christmas of 2021, I bought an on-offer Dell PowerEdge T340. The T340 is a Tower server, 6 Core CPU, 32GB RAM, and 4TB of Storage. I set up everything on this new machine beginning with VMWare ESXI.