Hi everyone,
Long time lurker, first time poster here. First off, thanks in advance for taking the time to read this. I have been using FreeNAS now for about 3 years--my original (and current build) has evolved over time and is based on a Supermicro A1SAi-2750F with 32GB RAM. It is currently hosting 1 zpool (4 x 2TB WD Red drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration) for file shares for my home network (home drives, photo archive, and Time Machine backups). There is a second zpool for jails (2 x 120GB SSDs mirrored). I had high hopes for jails and Docker but have come to the conclusion that I’d prefer instead to have the flexibility of running VMs outside of FreeNAS.
The current hardware is going on 3+ years old, so I’m wanting to refresh it before I start to experience failures. My plan is to virtualize FreeNAS under ESXi by passing through the controller for the zpool disks. I drew out a rudimentary diagram of what this would look like in practice.
I’ve got a rough framework for what I want to do, but I have not settled entirely on a processor/motherboard combination. And whatever I choose will possibly drive the need for additional controllers for the other disks (since at least controller will be passed-through to the FreeNAS VM running on ESXi).
I like the power consumption of my current Atom board, but it leaves a few things to be desired. The first is that it only takes the small form-factor SODIMMS (laptop memory basically). The challenge is finding these modules in an ECC configuration. Whatever board I buy should accept regular form-factor memory. The other issue is it’s currently in a Fractal Design Node 304 case (very cramped). The new build will be in something like a Fractal Design Define R5.
So far, here is what I am considering:
In a nutshell, the design criteria is:
Thanks in advance!
Long time lurker, first time poster here. First off, thanks in advance for taking the time to read this. I have been using FreeNAS now for about 3 years--my original (and current build) has evolved over time and is based on a Supermicro A1SAi-2750F with 32GB RAM. It is currently hosting 1 zpool (4 x 2TB WD Red drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration) for file shares for my home network (home drives, photo archive, and Time Machine backups). There is a second zpool for jails (2 x 120GB SSDs mirrored). I had high hopes for jails and Docker but have come to the conclusion that I’d prefer instead to have the flexibility of running VMs outside of FreeNAS.
The current hardware is going on 3+ years old, so I’m wanting to refresh it before I start to experience failures. My plan is to virtualize FreeNAS under ESXi by passing through the controller for the zpool disks. I drew out a rudimentary diagram of what this would look like in practice.
I’ve got a rough framework for what I want to do, but I have not settled entirely on a processor/motherboard combination. And whatever I choose will possibly drive the need for additional controllers for the other disks (since at least controller will be passed-through to the FreeNAS VM running on ESXi).
I like the power consumption of my current Atom board, but it leaves a few things to be desired. The first is that it only takes the small form-factor SODIMMS (laptop memory basically). The challenge is finding these modules in an ECC configuration. Whatever board I buy should accept regular form-factor memory. The other issue is it’s currently in a Fractal Design Node 304 case (very cramped). The new build will be in something like a Fractal Design Define R5.
So far, here is what I am considering:
- Another Atom-based board
- Low-power Intel I3
- Low-power Xeon
In a nutshell, the design criteria is:
- Power efficiency
- Ability to handle household file sharing and run some other utility VMs (Unifi controller, Plex, ELK stack, AWS Storage Gateway perhaps)
- Allow pass-through of the SAS/SATA controller to the FreeNAS VM running under ESXi
- Nice to have: Ability to do some kind of mirroring for the VMFS volumes for the VMs. However, my plan is for my VMs to be ephemeral to where they can be reproduced with scripts. All data needing to be persisted will live on ZFS volumes shared from FreeNAS.
Thanks in advance!