Draft Server/NAS 4.0

[palmboy5]

I need more RAM, but I've also been told that I should be using ECC RAM... That basically leaves me with server hardware options. Draft parts list:



Sometime down the road I intend to have 8x 4TB in RAIDZ2 (24TB "effective").

[palmboy5]

In addition to ECC, that hardware supports VT-d so I can explore options of virtualizing the server (the RAID card needs to be directly assigned to a VM, which requires VT-d) and running other VMs in parallel.

[palmboy5]

Still new to the server segment LOL, finally found current gen hardware:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813182821
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819116906

Benefit with that motherboard is that it comes with a good LSI RAID chip right on the board, saving me the trouble/money of needing to buy this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816118182

I hear the motherboards are picky on RAM so simply went with the RAM that was mentioned as working by user review.
2x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820239370

I'm excited to try the IPMI functionality that allows complete remote management of the system. You can remotely change BIOS settings and mount drives! It means I could technically turn on the server if it was off, adjust all necessary BIOS settings, and install Windows, from hundreds of miles away, all without needing to ask someone to touch the physical system.

[palmboy5]

This is a fascinating option...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813157475
8 core Atom and 12 SATA ports LOL
I've never seen a mini-ITX board with 4 RAM slots before!

[palmboy5]

Argh!

I want to get this combo:


But the compatibility is questionable. The E3-1231 v3 is a "refresh" model Haswell that older chipset motherboards such as that one require a BIOS update before they'll work together. So if the motherboard doesn't ship with a new enough BIOS then I'm screwed. Need a compatible CPU in order to update the BIOS.

And while I could just settle with the older 1230 v3 model, that actually costs $50 more due to this combo deal being $50 off.

[palmboy5]

The combo deal just ended. Made going with the 1230 v3 much easier despite meaning I'm spending $50 more.

[2005]

So what do you do with your server?

Is it mainly just a NAS box or do you use it for other things?

[palmboy5]

I actually just built it recently.
Here's the only picture I bothered to upload as the entire system is still a WIP:
http://www.mylilsite.net/images/haswell-3/t4inside1.jpg
It's just missing eight SATA cables in that pic, which throw all that neatness out the window.
Still investigating the software-side for what the best configuration is.

General goals are simply:
Data serving (NAS)
Plex Media Server to transcode and stream my videos to Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, and Android devices.
Virtual Machines for any purposes whatsoever.

The Plex transcoding of 1080p videos is by far the greatest reason why I chose a relatively beefy CPU.
Maxed out the RAM so I can run many VMs.
The RAM is expensive because of ECC. ZFS checksums everything it touches, which is great, but what if the RAM causes incorrect checksums? ECC is just the next step I'm making toward ensuring data integrity.

As for investigating software:
SmartOS looks and sounds interesting but is fully command line and I don't like that.

Currently using VMware ESXi with FreeNAS in a VM. The 8 port LSI SATA chip is directly passed to the FreeNAS VM, which is something I could only do on a motherboard that supports VT-d (this is my first mobo capable of doing it, finally). VT-d is a feature that allows you to directly assign physical hardware to particular VMs for them to use as if those hardware were really a part of that VM. I could, for example, also assign a video card to a VM so that it could utilize its GPGPU/CUDA capabilities. For now though, all I did was give FreeNAS direct access to the hard drives.

I used to run my VMs on my desktop, eating my RAM and bottlenecking all of them to my gigabit ethernet connection to the NAS. Now I can run those VMs on the same system as the NAS. Check out the throughput my Windows 8 VM gets when accessing the data share from the FreeNAS VM on that same system:

Aint no gigabit bottlenecking going on here! And I should be able to add another 100MB/s after optimizing the setup.
I also didn't like that the uptimes of my VM's were dictated by the needs of my desktop. I'd much rather they run on a true 24/7/365 system instead.

[palmboy5]

Annoying thing: Latest VMware Player creates VMs as "version 10" while ESXi 5.5 (lateish 2013) only supports up to version 8. My VMs are too new to be copied over to ESXi and ran. I have to create new VMs and start over (not entirely a bad thing..)

[palmboy5]

There we go.

[palmboy5]

I have so far been unable to get ESXi to use an iSCSI target provided by FreeNAS, very frustrating.