boricuastock
Cadet
- Joined
- May 6, 2013
- Messages
- 3
Hello,
I have been reading these forums for some time gathering information and deciding on how to best build a system for my home use. I have read the warnings about VMs in these forums and understand there are risks. I plan to code up a Amazon Glacier like interface to dump critical data, everything else I am able to reproduce (movies, tv shows, stuff like that). That being said, I have come up with the following build.
-Proc. - E5-2620 v2 6 core processor - max frequency of 2.6ghz
-Ram - Hynix DDR3-1600 16GB ECC/REG (I plan to up this to 32gb or more depending on feedback)
-Mobo - Supermicro X9SRL-F-O
-PSU - Cooler master 1000w gold plus psu (I know this is a lot but this should allow the psu to run efficiently plus it was on sale :) )
-IBM M1015 raid card in IT mode
-6-8 4tb drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration
I am trying to consolidate all of my storage/servers in my home environment. I have a background in Linux and san storage environments working for IBM for several years. I understand that the board has enough sata ports but my plan is to hand FreeNAS the storage card via pci pass-through so it should have hardware control of all of its drives. I plan to try and use Xen as my hypervisor and plan to have the following 3 VMs as a minimum.
1. Dom0 - Debian
2. FreeNAS ( I plan to dedicate 10+ gb of memory to this VM)
3. Windows 7 (HTPC)
Using freenas, I would like to utilize both iSCSI to the htpc to record to and samba or NFS to other clients on my home network. I store blu-rays, tv shows, pictures, and amongst other things. I will be watching movies/TV Shows stored on these drives and writing data simultaneously at times.
The other piece is I plan on letting the HTPC VM ( windows 7) to record using iscsi. It then has a comskip process that processes the recordings for commercials, this process does use a lot of CPU reading and processing the show. I run this currently on an old core 2 duo machine where it processes shows on a shared drive so I am not worried about it working since I do it now. I would like to consolidate my multiple machines though. I am worried more about the load to ZFS using network reads and writes. I do also run conversions on blu-rays into other formats.
Here are a few questions:
1. Knowing that some processes are single threaded, is this processor fast enough to handle the 3-4 clients that may be accessing FreeNAS over the network (iScsi, samba, etc)?
2. Would 10gb of RAM be enough for a system like this to start? ( I do plan on adding more over time for sure)
3. I would love to saturate the network but even if I got a benchmark of about 80 mb/s on writes and reads, I would be pleased with that. Might this be possible with this system?
I would like to get the E5-1650 v2 but cannot find it for sale anywhere as of yet. It has a much higher operating frequency (3.5 ghz) but I can't buy it if I can't find it. I would like to stick to the E5 Xeons because I am worried about the 32GB ceiling in the future. Even if I only buy 16gb initially due to budget, I plan to add more withing a few months, especially if performance is lacking. Ideally I would have 64gb of memory in this system.
Any feedback or thoughts will be much appreciated.
I have been reading these forums for some time gathering information and deciding on how to best build a system for my home use. I have read the warnings about VMs in these forums and understand there are risks. I plan to code up a Amazon Glacier like interface to dump critical data, everything else I am able to reproduce (movies, tv shows, stuff like that). That being said, I have come up with the following build.
-Proc. - E5-2620 v2 6 core processor - max frequency of 2.6ghz
-Ram - Hynix DDR3-1600 16GB ECC/REG (I plan to up this to 32gb or more depending on feedback)
-Mobo - Supermicro X9SRL-F-O
-PSU - Cooler master 1000w gold plus psu (I know this is a lot but this should allow the psu to run efficiently plus it was on sale :) )
-IBM M1015 raid card in IT mode
-6-8 4tb drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration
I am trying to consolidate all of my storage/servers in my home environment. I have a background in Linux and san storage environments working for IBM for several years. I understand that the board has enough sata ports but my plan is to hand FreeNAS the storage card via pci pass-through so it should have hardware control of all of its drives. I plan to try and use Xen as my hypervisor and plan to have the following 3 VMs as a minimum.
1. Dom0 - Debian
2. FreeNAS ( I plan to dedicate 10+ gb of memory to this VM)
3. Windows 7 (HTPC)
Using freenas, I would like to utilize both iSCSI to the htpc to record to and samba or NFS to other clients on my home network. I store blu-rays, tv shows, pictures, and amongst other things. I will be watching movies/TV Shows stored on these drives and writing data simultaneously at times.
The other piece is I plan on letting the HTPC VM ( windows 7) to record using iscsi. It then has a comskip process that processes the recordings for commercials, this process does use a lot of CPU reading and processing the show. I run this currently on an old core 2 duo machine where it processes shows on a shared drive so I am not worried about it working since I do it now. I would like to consolidate my multiple machines though. I am worried more about the load to ZFS using network reads and writes. I do also run conversions on blu-rays into other formats.
Here are a few questions:
1. Knowing that some processes are single threaded, is this processor fast enough to handle the 3-4 clients that may be accessing FreeNAS over the network (iScsi, samba, etc)?
2. Would 10gb of RAM be enough for a system like this to start? ( I do plan on adding more over time for sure)
3. I would love to saturate the network but even if I got a benchmark of about 80 mb/s on writes and reads, I would be pleased with that. Might this be possible with this system?
I would like to get the E5-1650 v2 but cannot find it for sale anywhere as of yet. It has a much higher operating frequency (3.5 ghz) but I can't buy it if I can't find it. I would like to stick to the E5 Xeons because I am worried about the 32GB ceiling in the future. Even if I only buy 16gb initially due to budget, I plan to add more withing a few months, especially if performance is lacking. Ideally I would have 64gb of memory in this system.
Any feedback or thoughts will be much appreciated.
