I needed to learn Linux to help customers at Octopus Deploy, so this was a bonus for me. For example, adding a new hard drive to the array in Unraid doesn't appear to take as much effort as adding a new hard drive in FreeNas. In doing some research, I chose Unraid over solutions such as FreeNAS was:
Support additional features such as TimeMachine (for my wife's Mac). Ability to recover from drive failures. Combine multiple drives and have it appear as one drive. My requirements for my original NAS server were: Please Note When I say hard drive, I am referring to drives that use disks. I had an old HP Tower, running an Intel Core i7-2600 with 16 GB of RAM and the ability to hold 3 3.5 inch hard drives and 1 SSD. As an added bonus, some of the solutions could run VMs. Most, if not all, had the ability to recover from a drive failure. In addition to better performance, some solutions could combine multiple hard drives and have them appear as one drive on the network. In doing some research online, I saw people built a NAS out of old computer parts. Most hard drives running at 7200 RPM should be able to hit at least 80 MB/s, if not 160 MB/s. I expect to see read/write speeds in the 110-120 MB/s range. On a gigabit wired connection, I would see read/write speeds in the 30 MB/s range. The router hardware, including the processor and RAM (yes routers have processors and RAM), the USB controller in the router, and finally, the single hard drive. That configuration has terrible performance because of multiple bottlenecks. In the past, my NAS solution was nothing more than an external hard drive connected to my Wifi router. Transferring files over USB thumbsticks was becoming a pain. Octopus Deploy provided me with another laptop. I have a desktop for gaming, and photo editing, a laptop for travel, and my wife has a laptop as well. Regardless if I am working from home, my house needs a NAS to share files between computers. In this article, I will walk through my thought process, along with the lessons I learned. In doing so, I have learned quite a bit about how hypervisors actually work. Did I really need two separate servers? I had a few weeks off of work, so I decided to work on combining the two into one MegaServer running Unraid. The funny thing was, I wasn't pushing either box all that hard. For almost a year, I had two servers sitting in my home office. So I built a new computer just to be a hypervisor. 
I needed more VMs than I thought my Unraid box could handle. This is where my misunderstanding of hypervisors came in. At first, I used Unraid as both my NAS and a simple hypervisor. That misunderstanding caused me to end up building two servers. When I started, I had some fundamental misunderstandings on how hypervisors work. Specifically, how I built a NAS and a hypervisor to host a bunch of VMs for a test lab. What I want to focus on for this post is how I built the infrastructure to help me work from home more efficiently.
I'll get into those differences in later posts. As expected, working from home is a lot different than working in an office. I've been working from home since April of 2018 for Octopus Deploy.
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