Blargh2015
Cadet
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2016
- Messages
- 4
All,
I have done my reading through the forums, pondering, and poking at things, and think I'm about ready to buy stuff, but would appreciate a review of my choices and thinking. This is a box for my home use (although the wife does streaming from the existing video server box this will be replacing part of), without crazy-high storage requirements.
First off, my design goals:
Case: I have an existing Antec Nine Hundred case I'll re-use, equiped with nice low-noise 120mm fans at nearly all points (including the drive cages) and the 200mm at top.
Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSH-TF ($330 NewEgg) or X11SSH-CTF ($436 NewEgg)
Driving reasons: - I like having 10Gb NICs onboard, as I'll probably need them in the next year or two. - I (and many others, it seems) have very good luck with Supermicro motherboards.
Concerns: - Right now, 64G of RAM is as much as can be stuffed on this board. - Only one x8 and one x2 (operationally) PCI-E 3.0 slots. Seems to limit future choices, esp. if one slot gets chewed up by the card. The -CTF variant has ports onboard, but I'm unsure if the onboard ports can be passed through to FreeNAS? The fact the board is a C236 and has VT-d would IMPLY it can - does anyone know if this works?
Boot: 16GB SanDisk Cruzer USB 3.0 thumb drive ($10), installed directly on the motherboard's built-in USB socket.
Power Supply: SeaSonic G-750 ($115 NewEgg). (Seems highly regarded on here, gets good reviews, is sized for 8 drives if I've done the math right...)
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1225v5 ($235 NewEgg) - any faster models seem to go up a little bit in price for a VERY little bit increased performance - this seems to be the sweet spot right now.
RAM: Crucial CT8374232 kit (2x16GB DDR4-2400) - ($196) - NOT on Supermicro's HCL, but is what Crucial's site comes up with for memory suggestions for the X11SSH-CTF motherboard.
Add On Card: Ye ol' M1015 or LSI 9240-8i if needed.
Hard Drives: 6 (or maybe 7) in total, WD3001FFSX (WD Red, 3Tb, 7200RPM)
Thoughts, comments, feedback? I'll probably end up moving the works into a larger case if I end up really needing more drives, but I like the 900's hard drive bay arrangement (three bays with a large fan in front). My main question is - can the X11SSH-CTF do passthrough to FreeNAS with the onboard controller or no?
Thanks in advance for any input!
I have done my reading through the forums, pondering, and poking at things, and think I'm about ready to buy stuff, but would appreciate a review of my choices and thinking. This is a box for my home use (although the wife does streaming from the existing video server box this will be replacing part of), without crazy-high storage requirements.
First off, my design goals:
- I want FreeNAS on top of ESXi. (I've used ESXi extensively in my professional job, both paid and free versions, and have a lot of experience with it, but not FreeNAS). My main goal with this entire project is condensing what are now four separate servers down to one better-built box.
- I want to run (as a separate VM) a router image. I'm pondering Juniper's vSRX (again, work experience), but looking at some of the open source options - this I would appreciate any sort of recommendations for what works well here. I'm a networking guy by trade, and 10Gb is probably next on my home-network options, and some of the Internet options are starting to need 10Gb handoffs as well.
- I have some of the drives already (4x3Tb) with dual rotating offline backups sized for that, they do not have many hours on them yet though... I'll be adding two more 3Tb drives to do 6x3Tb, and am planning RAID-Z2. I am a LITTLE concerned about slightly different drives in terms of aging, but not terribly so. I want some capacity for future growth and expansion, but I'm not presently planning on needing a ton more. I may get a 7th drive and leave it as a hot spare.
- I need ECC RAM - I've personally seen ECC catch errors on other servers a couple times in the past, and since I'm doing a few eggs in one basket here, it's worth it to me. How MUCH of the RAM I haven't 100% nailed down, although right now I'm thinking 32G (8G to FreeNAS, 24G to others), but 8G to FreeNAS may be a little light...
- I need onboard IPMI - this server sits quite a ways away from my office, and no real easy monitor/keyboard situation there (I have to disconnect my desktop's equipment and drag it down). Doable (especailly for setup), but undesirable.
- For additional VMs, I'm planning two additional Debian Linux based VMs, and prefer running grsec-protected kernels. From the reading I've done, this shouldn't be a problem, as long as I compile the kernel with grsec configured to be a guest OS. In addtion, at least two and probably up to 4 Windows VMs. Most of these aren't doing much (email, light web surfing), but one box will be a media/miniDLNA/transcoding/Plex VM, and one of the VMs will be a game server for a game that will gobble all the CPU you give it.
- Power consumption is not a huge concern. Practically any combination of current-day hardware will be less power-hungry than the combination of old servers and desktops I'll be replacing.
- 16G onboard USB storage for ESXi hypervisor and FreeNAS boot image. Admittedly, the weakest link here, but ESXi limits my boot device choices here. I would LOVE to be able to at least onboard mirror these, but I don't believe it's possible.
- I'm HOPING the X11SSH-CTF's onboard ports can be passed-through to FreeNAS. Else, snagging a LSI 9240-8i/ServeRAID M1015 off eBay and (after testing a fair bit), attaching the 6x3Tb to it, and operating the card in pass-through mode to the FreeNAS instance.
- Setting up a partition under FreeNAS for iSCSI export for the VM storage for OS partitions. The FreeNAS server will have the rest of the space as a NFS/SMB mount for the VMs for bulk/data storage. (This one I'm a little wishy-washy on - NFS for everything would allow combined storage pools, but ESXi NFS always strikes me as adding additional overhead and complexity for quite little gain...)
- FreeNAS VM set for auto-boot, and a FreeNAS script to tell ESXi to rescan storage and boot other VMs (I saw someone has just posted a link to a script to do this already pre-made, so I'll probably just use that, but I've used ESXi's ssh-based command line for scripting before)
- Not planning a SLOG or other SSD drive at this time - I don't need insanely high performance, and I don't feel its warranted with this few of Tb of storage at the moment.
Case: I have an existing Antec Nine Hundred case I'll re-use, equiped with nice low-noise 120mm fans at nearly all points (including the drive cages) and the 200mm at top.
Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSH-TF ($330 NewEgg) or X11SSH-CTF ($436 NewEgg)
Driving reasons: - I like having 10Gb NICs onboard, as I'll probably need them in the next year or two. - I (and many others, it seems) have very good luck with Supermicro motherboards.
Concerns: - Right now, 64G of RAM is as much as can be stuffed on this board. - Only one x8 and one x2 (operationally) PCI-E 3.0 slots. Seems to limit future choices, esp. if one slot gets chewed up by the card. The -CTF variant has ports onboard, but I'm unsure if the onboard ports can be passed through to FreeNAS? The fact the board is a C236 and has VT-d would IMPLY it can - does anyone know if this works?
Boot: 16GB SanDisk Cruzer USB 3.0 thumb drive ($10), installed directly on the motherboard's built-in USB socket.
Power Supply: SeaSonic G-750 ($115 NewEgg). (Seems highly regarded on here, gets good reviews, is sized for 8 drives if I've done the math right...)
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1225v5 ($235 NewEgg) - any faster models seem to go up a little bit in price for a VERY little bit increased performance - this seems to be the sweet spot right now.
RAM: Crucial CT8374232 kit (2x16GB DDR4-2400) - ($196) - NOT on Supermicro's HCL, but is what Crucial's site comes up with for memory suggestions for the X11SSH-CTF motherboard.
Add On Card: Ye ol' M1015 or LSI 9240-8i if needed.
Hard Drives: 6 (or maybe 7) in total, WD3001FFSX (WD Red, 3Tb, 7200RPM)
Thoughts, comments, feedback? I'll probably end up moving the works into a larger case if I end up really needing more drives, but I like the 900's hard drive bay arrangement (three bays with a large fan in front). My main question is - can the X11SSH-CTF do passthrough to FreeNAS with the onboard controller or no?
Thanks in advance for any input!
