Mini ITX mainboard

[mrbenza]

Hello to all..
I need to replace my old mobo (Asus C60)
I Node Fractal 304 that can fit Mini ITX and DTX.
5 disks (1.5TB each) in RAID Z1 and 16 GB of RAM. A disc and 'fault and needs to be replaced. (with the red WD 2TB)

Which mainboard you recommend?
I was planning to virtualize everything in vmware EXSI 6.
I need some different OS and it seems better vmware instead of phpVirtualBox.

The ASRock E3C226D2 with I3 processor it's a good idea?
About Supermicro?

thx in advance

 

[Darren Myers]

Supermicro is my preferred brand, before you go saying you want to virtualize everything do a search for "Virtualize" and see how many results you get and why its a bad idea.

Why do you need VM's,what are your storage needs?

 

[mrbenza]

thanks for the reply..
Storage of music, data and my programs. I need to virtualize multiple operating systems (I am creating a management program that runs on local net and on Windows only) and I thought vmware EXSI was a best solution.
But I can always use the jail virtualbox.
I do not think to use more than 2 or 3 vm simultaneously ..

Which mainboard you recommend?
Cpu?

 

[Darren Myers]

So the issue is is that FreeNAS doesnt *really* like being virtualized, and it wants X amount of RAM, having only 16Gb of RAM to share between possibly 4 VM's + the host isnt going to cut it, i would be more comfortable with 32GB for a VM host with 16 of that dedicated to FreeNAS alone, and the other 12 ish for the other 3 VM's and then 4Gb for the host to use.

You can only do so much in a jail, i would not try and virtualize anything in a jail that you dont need, it will only cause you headaches, you could try using the virtualbox plugin, some use that for VM's.

Last thing to consider is a price range for a motherboard, cpu, and RAM.

 

[Xelas]

I would concur with Darren - I'm actually running FreeNAS in ESXi 6 (and was running it under 5.1, and 5.5 before), but it hasn't been all smooth sailing. I've had to dig deep into ESXi command line to fix various network and driver issues, and there are still reports of flakiness with the virtual network driver that FreeNAS needs to with ESXi's virtual switch. Also, with every ESXi update, you have to back up the FreeNAS config, shut down all the VMs, update ESXi, and hope and pray that the update didn't break FreeNAS's virtual network driver (which happened to me 3 times) or introduce any other source of flakeiness.
You also DEFINITELY need at least 32 GB RAM - I had 16GB for a bit, with 12GB allocated to FreeNAS, but arcstat showed some signs of the system being stressed when I had, for example, a Windows VM installing an update and then someone trying to browse shares in FreeNAS. Things are better with 32 GB, with 22GB allocated to Freenas and the rest diced up for my 2-4 VMs.

The problem with VirtualBox is one of performance - ESXi is so much faster! - but you pay by having to deal with ESXi's occassional tantrums and keeping the house of cards from tumbling down.

You also have to be very careful in figuring out how you plan to allocate the physical disks and controllers to Freenas, ESXi, and ESXi's VM storage. I'm running a bootstrap config, where all VMs except Freenas actually reside on a FreeNAS volume, but you have to babysit this config, and reboots require handholding as ESXi scans for volumes while it boots and doesn't find anything because FreeNAS itself hasn't booted yet, becasue it's a VM in ESXi. With ecery boot, I have to manually re-add the iSCSI volumes, then manually boot up each VM. It might be better under NFS instead of iSCSI - not sure - but there are other trade-offs in performance and reliability that makes this messier than you might think.

If I had the money, I'd definitely break it up into 2 separate systems - an ESXi machine, and a separate dedicated FreeNAS instance. MUCH less heartache and stress. The ESXi machine needs a fast-ish CPU, but that's the machine you can skimp on with normal, non-ECC RAM, you can probably get away with 16 GB, you don't need much storage (since you'll be leveraging FreeNAS for storage, right?), etc. It can be considerably cheaper than your FreeNAS box.

 

[Spearfoot]

With ecery boot, I have to manually re-add the iSCSI volumes, then manually boot up each VM.

@Xelas: you can configure your system to have a FreeNAS startup script automatically re-scan the VMware datastores it provides.

First you have to configure SSH on your VMware server to allow password-free secure connections (instructions here at the VMware website) .

Then configure a FreeNAS Init/Shutdown task to run the following 'postinit' script (substituting your VMware user credentials and hostname for 'root@host' below):

Code:

ssh root@host esxcli storage core adapter rescan --all

This will cause VMware to rescan your iSCSI datastores.

With some trial-and-error, you can then determine how long your system takes before the datastore becomes available and set the VM startup delay accordingly.