My trustty old Hardware exploded and i need something new

[madtulip]

Hello guys. Thanks for reading and helping!

So my trusty old TrueNas Hardware (recycled old i7-2700k 4 cores based gaming PC) died (depending on wether or not i plug the 4x12V + 4xGND plug for CPU power to the MB nothing spins up anymore) and i apparently need new hardware. What remains is a 4x4TB western digital red HDD ZFS pool.

My usecase: Im running this in a 10 person private/family environment initially mainly as NAS to serve files and the one hardware platform that is available 24/7 for all kinds of small stuff. i.e. serving .m3u lists for IPTV Channels and whatnot. Then over the years i installed things like Plex (more playing around than actually using) and recently HomeAssistant with some dozent IoT things. HomeAssistant had to be installed in a VM instead of jail and thus use dedicated CPUs - i kinda disliked this not beeing available in a jail. IIRC that had something to do with truenas beein FreeBSD instead of debian based - i dont remember correcly. Bottom line is, that im not allways using TrueNAS based stuff and might need other parallel operating systems and thus thought to maybe look into better VM handling with i.e. "Scale"). Im an IT/ET Engineer by profession, developing digital and analoge low voltage PCBs, programming microcontrollers. i like playing around with everything involving electricity or software.

So regarding new hardware i was currently thinking: lets get a 2nd hand server hardware instead of a gaming pc this time. maybe
- Fujitsu Primergy RX2530 M2
-- 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2667V4 SR2P5 8C Server Prozessor 8x 3,20 GHz 25MB Cache 2011-3 CPU
--- OR maybe Intel Xeon E5-2640V4 for something with 90W instead of 135W TDP
-- 32GB or 64GB ECC Ram
-- Intel Corporation C612 series chipset 8-Port 6G SATA Onboard Controller (RAID 0,1)
Thats available in the range of 600€ to 700€ atm.

Probably overkill for my use case - i likely only need 8 HDD slots and ~10+ Cores, but for any kind of half way useable Hardware you pay 500€ anyway, so why not 200€ more for something that is build for headless 24/7 operation and has enough CPU Cores for quite some VM projects. Enough of old Desktop/ gaming PCs. Gives me the option to put 4 more disks in case storage space runs out as well. Any other hardware suggestions in that area of price/performance? Supermicro products maybe better because of compatibility or storage controller or so?

So im a bit confused if TrueNAS Core (or maybe scale because i like the shift towards debian and might have some more VMs) would run well on such hardware. I exspecially have no clue about the onboard storage controller and how that would interact with my 4x4TB HDD ZFS pool. Can i just plug those in there and it will run, or do i need a different kind of storage controller or flash some HBA/IT Mode whatevere firmware there? im not experienced in server hardware and theire storage/raid controllers at all. As far as i understand ZFS and Raid are different approaches to the same problem and i would not need to set up my HDDs with some raid redundance underneath, as the ZFS file system already handles redundancies and so on? Id like to keep ZFS which is the main point for using TrueNAS for me.

As far as i understand (and i probably dont) i could have something like ESXi installed and have TrueNAS as well as HomeAssistant run in two parallel VMs in that (which would then require RAID for redundance, as those VMs dont have access to the physical drives, but only some virtual space assigned to it? In what way does ZFS then still make sense?), or i could base everything on TrueNAS Core (or maybe better Scale) and host HomeAssistant as VM in TrueNAS (as i had it so far)? Can HomeAssistant run as a "Jail" in TrueNAS Scale by now in a sense that it dynamically (instead of dedicated) uses the same CPU Cores as the Host system? So i guess you get what im confused about here. Im not sure about which structure to choose in that sense and what would be the Pros and Cons, and if and how that would influence my choice of storage controller or choice or use of things like iRMC S4.

Sorry for wall of text. Many questions. Help please! :)

 

[jhl]

The market may be different in your country but in the US you can get a used Workstation class computer like an HP Z440 for about 3x cheaper than the server you mentioned - there's a Z440 on eBay right now for $160 USD. These are a good choice because they use Registered ECC memory just like the server you are looking at, which tends to be cheaper.

If you want to virtualize you'll need to pass through the SATA/SAS controller to the Truenas VM which means the hypervisor cannot see anything attached to that controller and the hypervisor cannot boot off disks attached to that controller. If you want to run Truenas on top of ESXi you'll need to be sure that your hardware has 2 SATA/SAS controllers built in, or plan to add an HBA to a second PCIe slot.

If you want to install Truenas direct on the hardware, you can freely use the SATA/SAS ports built into the motherboard as well as any separate HBA.

You do NOT want RAID in addition to ZFS, if the server comes with an RAID card you would need to flash it to HBA/IT mode or replace it if it cannot be set up that way.