Should I buy a new or a used server

[jgreco]

That’s right. I only had six SATA ports, no hba, so the entire SATA controller was passed into FreeNAS leaving NO Sata ports for ESXi! and I needed a place for the FreeNAS vm boot image. M.2 is overkill, but was the best solution to my problem. Evo drives were cheap/reliable.

In a full size build I’d probably be using an HBA for FreeNAS, and that’d leave a lot of motherboard SATA for ESXi. Then I would use a 2.5” ESXi datastore SSD. Best practice for ESXi is to boot off a USB. In an enterprise scenario ESXi boot usbs are disposable/replaceable and a created with scripts. In a once off install, it probably makes sense to just boot off the primary datastore.

M.2 would probably get used for an optane slog. 900p?

I was kinda curious here why you wouldn't pass the SATA ports through to FreeNAS and use a RAID controller for ESXi datastores. Then I realized that a lot of people here probably have nonredundant datastores for their ESXi.

If your mainboard has sufficient SATA/SAS for your NAS deployment, a better ESXi strategy is to pass those to FreeNAS, and then use something like an LSI 9270CV-8i for your ESXi datastores. These are available dirt cheap on eBay from time to time and will give you much better I/O performance in ESXi. The mainboard SATA are also more competent at things like SSD, so if you're doing SSD with FreeNAS, that's the way to go.

I'm not sure who said it was best practice for ESXi to boot off USB. It's supported but it sucks for a lot of the same reasons FreeNAS 8 and 9 sucked booting that way. If you want nonredundant ESXi boot, use SLC SATADOM. If you want redundant ESXi boot, do it via DAS RAID1. It probably doesn't matter if you have a rack full of hypervisors running VM's off a SAN array, where the loss of a hypervisor is a *shrug* and vSphere just spins them up on a different hv, but where reliable booting of ESXi is required, USB is definitely *not* recommended.

 

[NasKar]

I have three chassis where the fans are running from the backplane but the backplane doesn't appear to do anything to control fan speed, just run full blast. In those systems, I have installed these:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/232107503676
They reduce the fan speed to about half of the original speed, which makes them quiet enough to keep me happy while still giving enough airflow to keep the drives cool. With the reduced fan speed, passive cooling of the CPU is not possible, so I had to change to an active (with fan) CPU cooler. It works for me.

Chris I finally got the fan cables with the resistors to reduce the fan speed. I had my orginal 3 HDD fans connected to the motherboad. After disconnecting them and connecting them to the backplane with the extension cables I'm getting an error in the IPMI with the fans headers that are not hooked up anymore. Is there a way to correct this?

 

[NasKar]

I'm getting an error in the IPMI with the fans headers that are not hooked up any more. Is there a way to correct this?

Fixed with IPMI reset: Maintenance/Factory Default