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Many readers have asked us how to set up a Minecraft server. Minecraft is a massive hit in gaming and has sold millions of copies. However, it was developed by an independent developer. One of the great things about Minecraft's independent route to market is that there is no "corporate" server requirement which plagues games like recent installments of Call of Duty. That means users are free to setup their own Minecraft servers at home, colocated or elsewhere. This model is very similar to Counter-Strike's scene from 2000-2001. Today we are going to show how to install Minecraft server on Windows 8 Hyper-V Ubuntu. This is an easy setup that uses little power and is great for hosting LAN games. Test Configuration In order to make it as relevant to the test case, my personal workstation will be used. CPU(s): Intel Core i7-3930K Motherboard: ASUS P9X79 WS Memory: 32GB (8x 4GB) G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3 1600 Drives: Corsair Force3 120GB, OCZ Vertex 3 120GB and 2x Samsung 840 Pro 256GB Chassis: Corsair Carbide 500R Power Supply: Corsair AX850 850w 80 Plus Gold OS: Microsoft Windows 8 Pro with Hyper-V and Ubuntu Server 12.10 One key aspect here is that the machine has a lot of very fast SSD storage. Traditional rotating disks can cause a Minecraft server to hang for players during disk access. Prerequisite: Install Ubuntu for Windows 8 Hyperv. Installing Ubuntu for Windows 8 Hyperv is easy. The major distributions include Hyper-V integration components, which makes installation much faster than with CentOS or many other distributions. Use the guide on how to install Ubuntu on Windows 8 Hyper-V in a few minutes. For a Minecraft server it is suggested that one uses the x64 server version. The workstation version requires more memory and takes up more space. Minecraft is a memory-intensive program so it is best to not waste memory. One major note here is that one wants the Minecraft server Hyper-V data store to run on a SSD. Install Minecraft Server on Windows 8 Hyper-V Ubuntu in 60 seconds Now for the fun part, getting a basic Minecraft server running in less than 60 seconds. It may take slightly longer if you have a slower Internet connection. The first step to install Minecraft server on Windows 8 Hyper-V is to install java. For this guide we are going to use java7. To install Java on Ubuntu, use the following command: sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless Here's a screenshot of how it will look (may be slightly different for those who have already done sudo-apt-get upgrade). Install Minecraft on Hyper-V Ubuntu JAVA Now that the Ubuntu server has java installed, you can get the files needed to install Minecraft server. First, you'll need to create a directory. I like minecraft server as my directory for a simple server. mkdir After this one needs to get the Minecraft Server files: wget -O ~/minecraft-server/server.jar https://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftDownload/launcher/minecraft_server.jar This command is much simpler because it follows the same path. Bukkit includes version numbers which makes things a bit more difficult. This is how it all looks: Install Minecraft on Hyper-V Ubuntu Minecraft Standard At this point one has installed Minecraft server on Windows 8 Hyper-V Ubuntu. It is possible to move the Minecraft server to another Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise or Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, or Hyper-V server machine by using this type. You can import the virtual server and then you are ready to go on a dedicated box. Now the next step is to launch Minecraft server after it is installed. These commands are what I use most often: cd minecraft-server java -Xmx2048M -Xms2048M -jar server.jar nogui That launches a 2GB of RAM minecraft server which most desktops can support. These numbers should be reduced to 1024M if one wants to use a Microsoft Surface Pro as the HyperV host. This is due to the limitations of 4GB RAM. An important factor here is that the more RAM the Hyper-V host has, the more it can allocate the the Ubuntu VM and the Minecraft server. Here is what that looks like: Install Minecraft on Hyper-V Ubuntu Start Minecraft That's all there was and it only took about a minute to get up and running with the Minecraft server in Hyper-V on a Ubuntu VM. There is another way. Scripting the Minecraft Server Installation on Ubuntu While entering commands is fun, we can use a simple bash script to do the installation. Log into the Ubuntu VM by using SSH or Hyper-V console. Then open a text editor. I use nano a lot so the command would be: nano minecraft-server-install.sh Copy the following lines and save/write the changes. #!/usr/local/bin/bash sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless mkdir ~/minecraft-server && wget -O ~/minecraft-server/server.jar https://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftDownload/launcher/minecraft_server.jar Once that is complete, you can run. sh minecraft-server-install.sh At which point the bash script will run, download and install java and Minecraft server. If you want to do this on Hyper-V or non Hyper-V Ubuntu Ubuntu installations, you can simply download the script and complete the installation in less than 20 second each time. Hopefully that was helpful. Always open to other suggestions and if we want, happy to do the same with bukkit or similar Minecraft server installations. The really cool thing here is that the installation is very portable since it is in Hyper-V and runs on many machines since Microsoft has brought Windows 8 Hyper-V to the masses. Feel free to suggest alternatives. TAGS minecraft Previous articleHP Moonshoot 1500 Hyperscale Computing Released Next articleASUS Z9PA-D8 Review - Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 ATX Motherboard Patrick Kennedy https://www.servethehome.com Patrick has been running STH since 2009 and covers a wide variety of SME, SMB, and SOHO IT topics. Patrick is a consultant in technology and has worked with many large storage and hardware vendors in Silicon Valley. STH's purpose is to help users find information about server storage, networking, and building blocks. Please feel free to share any helpful information on the forums. 7 COMMENTS Yuri April 9, 2013 At 5:18 am Guys, I don't get "How to do something by Captain Obvious" kind of articles. minecraft What's happening to STH? Stephen Davis April 9, 2013 at 8:42 AM Yuri - Sorry that you are not enjoying the recent how-to articles. We can only afford to test and buy so much news and product. Sometimes we create articles based upon projects we are currently working on or fun activities we just completed. This is evident in the Xen articles. I have been working on a prototype public cloud and am now sharing it with others. If you have any suggestions or are interested in a specific topic, please let us know. Please join us on the forums. There is a subforum for main site article ideas. http://forums.servethehome.com/servethehome-com-article-suggestions/ Patrick Kennedy April 9, 2013 At 10:50 am Yuri, as Stephen mentioned, feel free to suggest or contribute content that you would like to see. Important to note is that not all things are obvious to everyone. This topic is the subject of many requests every week. xena April 9, 2013 at 11:40am Well +1 Yuri. minecraft This site has been a regular visitor for two years. I have noticed a decline in quality, or at least in the quality of the topics. Year-two ago we have articles about 4 sockets motheboards, raid cards test, great articles about ibm1015 for example followed great ebay auction etc... thats what make you really special and unique and you get readers around world(in my case from central eu location). With topics such as minecraft or memtest, you make this site so lowend that people start to check if they are really on STH. Cmon Patrick! You found this site and made it special for people in IT ranks or high-end enthusiasts. We were very happy with the information we found on your site. Now it feels like you're dumping your older readers and getting us low-quality food instead of the high-quality food we are used to. Just few my cents... Patrick Kennedy April 9, 2013, at 1:33 p.m. xena. Thanks for your feedback. The next two days will likely have content more in-line with the older content (dual LGA2011 review and a cool projects piece.) I started a thread here: http://forums.servethehome.com/servethehome-com-article-suggestions/1672-sth-main-site-direction-april-2013-a.html where we can continue the discussion. Always welcome this type of feedback and is a big reason that we have a dedicated public forum to exactly this topic. You are also welcome to contribute if your ideas are more relevant. We are always happy to help people get more exposure for their projects. Morko June 12, 2013 At 12:36 am It wasn't all for nothing though. This article was interesting and very helpful. First I tried this http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/blogs/gadgets-on-the-go/setting-up-a-minecraft-home-server-20120823-24own.html, great tutorial but it didn't serve all angles I was looking for so yeah, thanks for the post. Ken February 7, 2015, 8:30 AM. As a reminder to future readers, Ubuntu can be installed in Hyper-V as a Gen 2 Virtual Machine. However, in order to have the install to work, you will need to disable "secure boot" in the Firmware Settings. To be clear, you simply create a new VM choosing Generation 2 as the type of VM, but before booting the VM for the first time you need to go into the settings for the VM, and U select 'require secure boot' (or something similar). The VM will boot, the install will find all the synthetic devices and use appropriate drivers. This has been tested under Hyper-V on both Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 running Ubuntu 14.10. LEAVE A REPLY Please enter your name. Please enter the email address below to save your name, email and website for the next comment. Sign me up for STH's newsletter This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn more about how your comment data is processed. Subscribe to our newsletter and receive the best of STH every week in your inbox We will curate the best STH posts each week and send them directly to your inbox. 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