Frankenstein

In my second semester of college, my friends and I noticed an old demo server sitting neglected in the back of the classroom. Its components were scattered across the room—some damaged, some missing, and others partially disassembled. The motherboard had bent CPU socket pins, and the whole thing looked like a lost cause. But since it was a demo unit, we realized we had a unique opportunity: we could do whatever we wanted with it.

That’s when I had the idea to bring it back to life—revive the hardware, rebuild the system, and turn it into a student-led project server. It would give us the chance to go beyond the curriculum and get real-world experience with enterprise-grade gear.

We got to work reassembling the system. The biggest challenge was repairing the bent CPU pins, but I managed to get them straightened and functioning again. When we finally booted the system successfully, we actually cheered. It felt like a real win.

We started off by installing Windows Server 2018 on a simple RAID 1 array labeled "WINDOWS SERVER RAID1"—you can see this in the mockup to the right. After gaining some initial experience, we wanted to take it further by exploring virtualization. So we set up another RAID 1 array—this one labeled "ESXI RAID 1"—and installed VMware ESXi.

At first, we rebooted between ESXi and Windows Server depending on what we wanted to use, but we quickly realized we could virtualize the Windows environment within ESXi. We created a VM that closely mirrored the physical server’s architecture and assigned it about a third of the system's resources. Then, we passed through the original Windows RAID array as a raw storage device to that VM. Just like that, we had our Windows Server environment virtualized and running smoothly.

Our next major goal was to use the server as a NAS. For that, we installed TrueNAS. Following best practices, we set the TrueNAS boot drive to reside in ESXi’s virtual storage, and used the server’s RAID card to configure a high-speed RAID 5 array made up of four drives. With RAM caching and other enhancements enabled, the result was blazing fast storage performance. We passed this array through to TrueNAS, satisfying its requirement to separate boot and storage devices.

TrueNAS did throw a warning because it only saw a single disk—something that usually indicates bad configuration—but it also correctly detected that we were using a hardware RAID controller and reassured us that the warning could be safely ignored. So we did.

We used TrueNAS to host most of our services, but the webpage itself was served by a lightweight Linux VM running Apache.