BUILD A New Project for 2013/H2

[TomWaller]

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!

 

[TomWaller]

OK - so I've changed my plans a little. Having read a lot about ECC preference and thinking about the IPMI/IP KVM features, I've decided to instead go the route of picking up the following hardware:

• Supermicro X9SCM-F
• Crucial 16GB kit (8GBx2), ECC, 240-pin DIMM, DDR3 PC3-10600 memory module

My idea behind this is that I can drop the Pentium G620 into this board and utilise the ECC RAM while also having what looks to be a decent server grade motherboard.

So I guess my question is this: I've seen a bunch of info out there that seems to indicate the Pentium G620 chips do infact support ECC when paired with a server based chipset such as the Intel C204. Does anyone here have hands on experience with this working?

 

[paleoN]

• Crucial 16GB kit (8GBx2), ECC, 240-pin DIMM, DDR3 PC3-10600 memory module

Is that kit unbuffered RAM?

So I guess my question is this: I've seen a bunch of info out there that seems to indicate the Pentium G620 chips do infact support ECC when paired with a server based chipset such as the Intel C204.

See this thread.

 

[TomWaller]

Thanks for the links. I've skimmed that thread in the past which was one of the things that lead me to more research on the G620. I also stumbled on a chart on this forum somewhere from Supermicro which seemed to indicate it is true also - great news.

As for the RAM, yes it is unbuffered. I used the Crucial Memory Advisor tool which actually guarantees this RAM as compatible with that motherboard. They happen to be good value too, bonus.

http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=D8926FD8A5CA7304

 

[TomWaller]

Thanks all for the advice in this thread.

I ended up picking up the Supermicro X9SCM-F with 16GB ECC Un-buffered RAM. The Pentium G620 does indeed utilise the ECC mode despite not being documented offically by Intel (that I could find anyway).

The IPMI/KVM features really do make this motherboard stand out from the consumer grade equipment I was originally planning on building around.

Now onward with testing the software!

Regards.

Tom.

 

[paleoN]

Thanks all for the advice in this thread.

LOL, yes all the advice, but you then didn't need much.

 

[TomWaller]

Well, while storage systems are not new to me, FreeNAS is, so it's nice to see a thriving community willing to help out newcomers.

So in the spirit of sharing, I thought I would just list out my complete system in case anyone cares to follow the build as it is all running well. I have so far found no incompatibilities.

Motherboard: Supermicro X9SCM-F mATX motherboard (http://goo.gl/4YJJul)
CPU: Intel Pentium G620 (65w) (http://goo.gl/l5C0a3)
RAM: 16GB (2x8GB) Crucial ECC Un-buffered RAM (http://goo.gl/S4IIbA)
Disks: 4 x 2TB Seagate ST2000DL003 in RAIDZ2 via on-board SATAII (http://goo.gl/bISjkN)
Case: Codegen 4u-500 with IcyBox 5-in-3 SATA hotswap caddy (http://goo.gl/01Rbsa)
CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 (Large, but *just* fits in under the stability bar in the case - about 5mm clearance) (http://goo.gl/lB8yMe)
Cooling: 2 x 80mm be Quiet! fans and 1 x 120mm be Quiet! fan - all PWM from motherboard
Boot: PNY 8gb micro USB drive connected directly to internal motherboard USB port
OS: FreeNAS 9.1-RELEASE amd64

I'm currently migrating all my data off my backup disks to my ZFS volume. Looking forward to trying out the other features FreeNAS has to offer.

t.