Upgrading from pure storage to home server

FadeToBlack

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Aug 12, 2014
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I've been using FreeNAS ever since v7 if I remember correctly, but I've mainly used it as a file/storage server. Over the years I've upgraded 3 times, starting with a amd E-350 to an Asrock Rack C2550D4I until my current Xeon E3-1220v5/Supermicro X11SSH-LN4F. My current system has 64Gb of ram, LSI 9305-16i HBA and a Chelsio T520-SO-CR, it has 2 vdevs of 10 disks in raidz2 (seperate pools).

As I've started playing with VM's lately I feel like I'm running into limitations with my cpu mostly, 4 cores without hyperthreading doesn't get you far I guess. So I started looking at new hardware. The idea was to use Proxmox as a hypervisor as I wanted to try that, but I've seen a bit to many threads advising against running TrueNAS virtualized that I'll skip that. I do want to run Pi-Hole/unbound, LanCache, mail server, some cloudstorage for friends/family, maybe PfSense and potentially some low trafic websites. I'm all new to this so I'll probably learn about other cool stuff to do with a home server as I go. I won't run a Plex server for example that needs to do 4k transcoding, it's mainly going to be some things that don't need a lot of resources (or at least I think they don't need much).

That said I've been looking at the new Intel Xeon Scalable (3rd gen) and I'm guessing the Intel® Xeon® Silver 4310 will probably suffise? For motherboard it's a bit trickier as there don't seem to be many socket 4189 boards available yet, but on Supermicro's website I found the X12SPO-NTF. At first it seemed to be lacking pci-e slots, but at that point I also din't know what those SlimSAS connectors were that it has 5 of. After reading an article on servethehome.com I came to realise that those could support 8 SATA/SAS drives each and I would just need a cable (SATA) to connect them. For memory I would probably start with 4 32Gb sticks, that would give me 128Gb and I could add more later on if I needed.

One thing to note maybe is that I'm using a Lian Li PC-D8000A for case and not a rackmount. It's the case I've been using for a while now and I like it, it's a lot more quiet then those rack mounted servers. It can fit a lot of spinning rust and those are mostly what I'll be using, ssd's only for boot and maybe one or two to host the VMs.

Now my questions/concerns:
- does TrueNAS support those SlimSAS connections (which would mean I can use my LSI HBA in another system or maybe even sell it)?
- are the intel x550 nics that are onboard good enough or do I need to keep my Chelsio?
- is that Xeon silver good enough or should I aim higher?
- any other concerns about my hardware selection?

Any suggestions for must-have VMs to run are also welcome.

I know it might be early to get some questions answered as these are just out, but I figured I'd try.
 

sretalla

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If you're going to do pfSense, I would reconsider virtualization... probably go with VMware (free edition is enough for a single server) as this will enable you to pass the NICs directly to the firewall and do the rest of the networking properly inside VMware's virtual switches.

I don't know too much about the potential compatibility problems with that quite new hardware, but VMware would abstract that from a TrueNAS perspective and will be fine on that side as long as VMware can deal with it all.
 

FadeToBlack

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Aug 12, 2014
Messages
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If you're going to do pfSense, I would reconsider virtualization... probably go with VMware (free edition is enough for a single server) as this will enable you to pass the NICs directly to the firewall and do the rest of the networking properly inside VMware's virtual switches.

I don't know too much about the potential compatibility problems with that quite new hardware, but VMware would abstract that from a TrueNAS perspective and will be fine on that side as long as VMware can deal with it all.

Thanks for the recommendation. I registered an account and watched some of the (oudated) videos you get on the personal vm download page. I'm sure the limitations from the free version won't be any problem for my personal use. In the license video they said there was a limit of 32Gb of ram, but after looking further that has been removed a while ago, hence why I said outdated on those videos. The only real limitation I would run into with the hardware I'm considering is a max of 8 vCPU/VM, which I doubt would be a problem for the things I want to do.

I'll start reading up more on the subject so that I'll have an idea on what to expect/do when I get new hardware.
 
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