Dedicated Gameserver OS Reccomendations help?

[Ensefalon]

Hello guys, I have recently acquired an HP DL380 G7 2U Server for 200 dollars. It contains two Intel X5667's at 3.06Ghz, 16 Gigs of 1066Mhz DDR3 RAM, A single 146GB 10K SAS Drive.

These CPUs DO support hyperthreading and Virtualization

I am looking for an Operating system to host gameservers such as garrysmod and or minecraft.

Coming strictly down to gamemodes I may use for Gmod may be spacebuild, ACF Sandbox, and or DarkRP.

Could someone give me a good OS recommendation as to what OS would provide the utmost best performance ( I am leaning towards the Gmod side of things), Same for easy management from my main windows machine in the house; FTP support and whatnot.

Any recommendations given will help me alot thanks!!

 

[DRDNA]

Does it have to be free or do you have a budget?

 

[Kursah]

I use MineOS using Turnkey Linux (arm of Debian) as a VM to host multiple Minecraft servers between Vanilla and mod servers for my boys. Has worked great for years.

I do use Windows Server 2012R2 w/GUI as the virtualization core and host OS, but you could use something like Proxmox as a Linux-based free VM core solution if you prefer to make that a virtualization server.

Depends on your abilities and needs from the hardware OS, and if you need a more fully fledged OS or not, if so Windows Server is a good way to go. You can use Server 2012R2 without activating, but it will limit updates you can install and prompt you to activate continuously.

Usually best performance is going to be a lightweight Linux option so more resources can be given to VM's, and I do suggest this route depending on what all you plan to host on that hardware. Though depending on how resource intensive GMOD is you might be limited here. Also depending on the type of Minecraft server/world/mods you host, and how many users you plan, you might be limited there as well.

I'm able to run MineOS on 8GB RAM, 4 threads, and 200GB VHD, but at most I have 5-8 on one of the servers at any given time. But no issues. I did upgrade to a RAID10 config from RAID5 which resolved some time delay/sync issues. So make sure your data is fast, resilient and redundant. Make backups, I run CRON jobs in MineOS for each server and then backup to my NAS nightly.



Edit: I should add that Windows 8/8.1 has Hyper-V, the same version as Server 2012/2012R2 and Windows 10 has the same version of Hyper-V as Server 2016. So in theory you could use a consumer-grade OS, but you don't get features like NIC teaming or advanced virtual switch support (iirc it is a slimmed down version). Consumer grade OSes do not usually make for good server OSes in a medium-to-high demand environment, but if you are in a lower-demand situation, you might be fine.