BUILD First build FreeNAS with X11SSL-CF

[lmbcdk]

Hello all,

I have been running a fairly basic FreeNAS setup on an old machine I had lying around for the past year and seems to be working great as a test/proof of concept for my needs as far as NAS storage goes.
Now I have been able to save up some funds to do an actual server-parts grade build. I have been having trouble trying to find concrete information on whether or not the parts that I found will work for my needs or not, so I came to here. Now, I have read many of the warnings and posts about virtualizing FreeNAS and appears that if I follow the steps provided in those posts and make sure to have the controller for the drives setup as passthrough with VT-d, then all should be fine.

Uses for this machine:

• FreeNAS storage for backups of machines at home, storing movies, and other random data that I do not use frequently.
• Running VMWare's ESXi as the virtualization environment
• In a separate VM (Ubuntu probably) running a plex server to serve the movies and other media stored in the pool
• Development/Testbed VMs to play around with and setup test environments in
• Possibly more VMs to come later as I find other needs/uses
  • May or may not put pfsense in here too

Now onto the parts list: (http://pcpartpicker.com/list/js6QVY)

• Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5 3.4GHz (~$252)
• Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSL-CF (~$254)
• 16GB of DDR4-2133 ECC ram from either Crucial/Samsung (whichever is available at the time of purchase) (~$90 for one 16GB stick)
• Power Supply: SeaSonic 450W SSR-450RM (~$74)
• Chassis: I will be using a spare ATX case that I have lying around
• UPS: APC BE550G (~$57)
• Hard Drives: reusing my 8 month old WD Red 2x2TB drives as a mirror, later on when my data needs increase I will upgrade to 6x2TB or 6x4TB drives depending on price and data needs at that time for use in a RAIDZ2 pool

Current total price for the build: $727
It would be nice to stay within the $500-$1000 price range for my budget. Later on, when I need more RAM, I can just purchase additional 16GB sticks to run with. With only the 2x2TB mirror, 8GB has been running just fine for my current uses, so I would have almost 8GB left for VMs, which I do expect to be expanding at some point.

Now, my main questions are:

• Running FreeNAS virtually with this board, is it possible to passthrough the built-in LSI SAS controller to the FreeNAS VM?
• Am I able to flash the LSI controller to IT mode to make it behave as just a simple HBA (as I want to make sure I can give the drives to the FreeNAS VM as raw individual disk drives so ZFS can do its job)?

I hope that my questions are clear enough and thank you everyone in advance for your helpful advice/comments/suggestions.

EDIT: I guess I should also mention that I am planning to have a small SSD (120GB?) in this build to install ESXi and for sure FreeNAS onto. Then any VMs that I am running, will run from the storage pool that FreeNAS provides as either an NFS or iSCSI connection to ESXi as a secondary datastore. If any of the VMs need faster performance, then they can be moved to the SSD datastore at that time.

 

[lmbcdk]

Any comments or suggestions?

 

[Flar84]

Hi,
just seing your message about your ESXi serving a freenas VM on a Supermicro X11SSL-CF.

That's basically my setup. In fact I run the N-1 setup (X10SL7-F + Haswell E5-1231 v3) since 18 months without any problem.
- IPMI console
- 32GB
- ESXI 6 on USB stick
- SSD on native SAS
- LSI 2308 dedicated to freenas with VT-D, Firmware IT
- 6x 2TB RAIDZ2
- UPS

Rock stable (ESXi ! ) for months, 4-5 VMs (Freenas, Ubuntu Plex, &more ...)

You won't take advantage of the LSI3008 (12Gb/s) with your spining disks.
The only plus of your Skylake setup is the 64GB RAM you absolutely need to get to host more VMs and not be memory limited.

You can go for it blindly (and seeing the date of your post you probably already have)

 

[lmbcdk]

Hi,
just seing your message about your ESXi serving a freenas VM on a Supermicro X11SSL-CF.

That's basically my setup. In fact I run the N-1 setup (X10SL7-F + Haswell E5-1231 v3) since 18 months without any problem.
- IPMI console
- 32GB
- ESXI 6 on USB stick
- SSD on native SAS
- LSI 2308 dedicated to freenas with VT-D, Firmware IT
- 6x 2TB RAIDZ2
- UPS

Rock stable (ESXi ! ) for months, 4-5 VMs (Freenas, Ubuntu Plex, &more ...)

You won't take advantage of the LSI3008 (12Gb/s) with your spining disks.
The only plus of your Skylake setup is the 64GB RAM you absolutely need to get to host more VMs and not be memory limited.

You can go for it blindly (and seeing the date of your post you probably already have)

Yes, I actually did go for this already over the Fourth of July weekend. I ended up going with the X11SSH-LN4F mobo for the quad Ethernet ports and m.2. I ended up just going with an LSI 9211-8i to pass through to FreeNAS in IT mode. I am now up to 48GB of ram and running smoothly since upgrading to 6x2TB raidZ2 array. Thanks for the reply!


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