TomWaller
Dabbler
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2013
- Messages
- 24
Hi all. Long-time lurker but first time poster. After trawling the forums for considerable time, I thought I would sign-up so I could run some of my findings past the experts.
My current situation is this - I use a home built server with a PERC 5/i (RAID 5 across 4 disks) to serve up my media to my SONOS/WD-TV systems around the house.
I also run a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III with some locally attached SAS 15k disks which provides me with a decent enough lab ESX environment (requirement for my job - and also indulging my inner geek).
I'm looking at a new project for the next couple of months which will involve building a couple of new ESX servers to replace the noisy and power hungry PowerEdge. For storage, I have been pondering some options and decided it looks like FreeNAS may be able to offer me some significant benefits such as iSCSI shared storage etc.
So my plan at the moment would be to re-configure my home server with a new motherboard with 6 SATAIII ports and run the 4 hard disks in a RAIDZ1 pool and use one of the remaining ports for a nice big SSD - possibly over iSCSI. This means I can ditch the PERC 5/i (very hot and draws watts I would rather save).
My network also has a new managed Gigabit switch and the home server has an additional 2 port Intel PRO 1000 MT network card. I think I would like to dedicate the 2 ports to iSCSI traffic and use the on-board for general network traffic. In the case of the ESX servers, I would look to do the same.
Does this sound like a feasible solution considering I am planning on running around 20 guests per host? Nothing with extremely heavy workloads - I appreciate it is impossible to give accurate recommendations based on very vague info I have provided but if anyone can at least confirm I am heading in the right (or wrong!) direction it would be greatly appreciated. I'd hope to achieve at least comparable disk access using SSD over iSCSI as I was seeing with the PE2950 and on-board storage.
The specification of my home server as it stands is:
Intel Pentium G620
Intel BH67DL
8GB 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM
Dell PERC 5/i
4 x Seagate 5900RPM HDD
Intel PRO 1000 MT Dual Port NIC
In order to get some extra SATA ports, I'm looking to swap the motherboard out for an ASUS P8Q77-M.
If you made it this far - thanks for taking the time to read!
My current situation is this - I use a home built server with a PERC 5/i (RAID 5 across 4 disks) to serve up my media to my SONOS/WD-TV systems around the house.
I also run a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III with some locally attached SAS 15k disks which provides me with a decent enough lab ESX environment (requirement for my job - and also indulging my inner geek).
I'm looking at a new project for the next couple of months which will involve building a couple of new ESX servers to replace the noisy and power hungry PowerEdge. For storage, I have been pondering some options and decided it looks like FreeNAS may be able to offer me some significant benefits such as iSCSI shared storage etc.
So my plan at the moment would be to re-configure my home server with a new motherboard with 6 SATAIII ports and run the 4 hard disks in a RAIDZ1 pool and use one of the remaining ports for a nice big SSD - possibly over iSCSI. This means I can ditch the PERC 5/i (very hot and draws watts I would rather save).
My network also has a new managed Gigabit switch and the home server has an additional 2 port Intel PRO 1000 MT network card. I think I would like to dedicate the 2 ports to iSCSI traffic and use the on-board for general network traffic. In the case of the ESX servers, I would look to do the same.
Does this sound like a feasible solution considering I am planning on running around 20 guests per host? Nothing with extremely heavy workloads - I appreciate it is impossible to give accurate recommendations based on very vague info I have provided but if anyone can at least confirm I am heading in the right (or wrong!) direction it would be greatly appreciated. I'd hope to achieve at least comparable disk access using SSD over iSCSI as I was seeing with the PE2950 and on-board storage.
The specification of my home server as it stands is:
Intel Pentium G620
Intel BH67DL
8GB 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM
Dell PERC 5/i
4 x Seagate 5900RPM HDD
Intel PRO 1000 MT Dual Port NIC
In order to get some extra SATA ports, I'm looking to swap the motherboard out for an ASUS P8Q77-M.
If you made it this far - thanks for taking the time to read!