So this build has taken quite a few different turns. Started out when I got interested in the potential of these cheap Xeon E5-2670's. My rig now:
2 x Xeon E5-2670 ( 2 x Noctua NH-12S coolers)
64GB 1600Mhz DDR3 ECC Reg
Lenovo D30 workstation board (Intel C602 chipset)
Intel 320 120GB SATA SSD
Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 in an M.2 to PCI-e lane converter card (board won't boot it)
Seasonic Platinum-1000 PSU
Phanteks Enthoo Pro with normal drive cages removed (to fit the board!!!)
5 x 3TB WD Greens of various models. Currently individual drives with stuff on them
My goals:
- Win10 regular desktop (VM or bare-metal) with GPU for gaming etc
- Redundant storage of some sort
- Unified Network Lab (runs as multiple VMs)
- Other Windows VMs
- Test Linux VMs
- Possibly a Kodi media-center VM that had a low-end GPU pass-through
My ideas:
- CentOS 7.x, use KVM for the VMs with passthrough for the Win10 and Kodi VMs, local ZFS or BtrFS for RAID5-ish storage
- Win10 bare metal with VM Workstation and .... ? for storage..
- ProxMox? I did briefly try it and thought it looks way too hard
- FreeNAS?
So.. the last option of FreeNAS came up just today when I saw it had KVM hypervisor support. So the big question is - can it do GPU pass-through to a VM? I see all these posts about using FreeNAS as a VM with some other hypervisor, but I couldn't understand why if FreeNAS itself can be the hypervisor.
2 x Xeon E5-2670 ( 2 x Noctua NH-12S coolers)
64GB 1600Mhz DDR3 ECC Reg
Lenovo D30 workstation board (Intel C602 chipset)
Intel 320 120GB SATA SSD
Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 in an M.2 to PCI-e lane converter card (board won't boot it)
Seasonic Platinum-1000 PSU
Phanteks Enthoo Pro with normal drive cages removed (to fit the board!!!)
5 x 3TB WD Greens of various models. Currently individual drives with stuff on them
My goals:
- Win10 regular desktop (VM or bare-metal) with GPU for gaming etc
- Redundant storage of some sort
- Unified Network Lab (runs as multiple VMs)
- Other Windows VMs
- Test Linux VMs
- Possibly a Kodi media-center VM that had a low-end GPU pass-through
My ideas:
- CentOS 7.x, use KVM for the VMs with passthrough for the Win10 and Kodi VMs, local ZFS or BtrFS for RAID5-ish storage
- Win10 bare metal with VM Workstation and .... ? for storage..
- ProxMox? I did briefly try it and thought it looks way too hard
- FreeNAS?
So.. the last option of FreeNAS came up just today when I saw it had KVM hypervisor support. So the big question is - can it do GPU pass-through to a VM? I see all these posts about using FreeNAS as a VM with some other hypervisor, but I couldn't understand why if FreeNAS itself can be the hypervisor.