I've acquired two machines that I want to setup and use primarily for development, and additionally as offsite backups for my critical data (financial documents, family photos, etc)
Equipment:
Use Case
Initial Thoughts
Equipment:
Machine A:
MOBO/CPU: Asrock C2750D4I (8 core, 8 thread total)
RAM: 16GB ECC
Storage capacity: 6 HDDs
Machine B:
Dell R900
CPU: 4 @ Xeon X7350 (4 core, 4 thread each, 16 core, 16 thread total)
RAM: 128GB ECC
Storage capacity: 5 HDDs
Storage:
HBA: LSI00194 - Sas9211-8i 8port Int Single 6gb Sata+SAS Pcie 2.0
6 @ 4TB WD Red
Use Case
One full desktop linux VM (persistent sessions, linux environment instead of corporate Win 7 as my laptop is)
A small (3 to 5 likely) number of mostly light linux VMs for docker development.
A few windows hosts with various development platforms (visual studio, Allen Bradley, Schneider, Beckhoff PLC programming platforms, etc)
The windows hosts will remain mostly powered off, and used primarily for 1 to 5 hours a week. At most 2 windows hosts powered on at the same time.
Windows hosts are relatively light, and are not particularly resource heavy (other than windows)
Dedicated 1 GbE interfaces on each box solely for A<->B traffic.
All management, user (myself and 1 or 2 other users max) traffic will occur on existing LAN
Initial Thoughts
- I figure that Machine A would be best used as the FN server. It's my old primary home server and I have had no issues with it after replacement board after hardware failure.
- I figure that Machine B would best be used as the ESXi host (even if limited to 6.0 U3) due to the doubled core count and vastly increased memory.
- Reading through resources and other threads, I will likely be using iSCSI for the windows hosts. To keep things simple, I'll likely use iSCSI for all VMs unless a good reason to use NFS for linux hosts.
- 3 striped mirrors in FN, used as datastore for ESXi
Help Needed / Questions- I am not familiar with the X7350 generation hardware, but all the review/comparisions I can find put the two boxes around the same performance, single thread and multi thread.
- Am I reading comparisons wrong, and the similar performance is for 1 Xeon socket vs the Atom SOC?
- Is using A for FN and B for ESXi the best choice?
- Would a 6 way mirror provide any benefits over 3 striped mirrors?
- I would think a 6 way mirror would not be a wise choice for VM storage as the write performance would be the same/similar as a single drive
- Am I incorrect in thinking that a FN acting as iSCSI / NFS data store would provide better performance than a single disk/ssd on the local ESXi server?
- I would prefer FN storage due to snapshots, redundancy, and other ZFS voodoo.
- Machine B is a new to me machine. I initially bought the HBA to use as a PCI pass through for Machine A to run ESXi, and virtualize FN.
- Would there be significant performance increases using the HBA in Machine B (ESXi with virtual FN via PCI pass-through), and finding another use for Machine A? I understand that if I virtualize FN, very bad things may happen, and that I should not store any critical data. I'm only considering this option since no data is expected to be critical on the hardware.
- Teaming / LACP
- This is unknown territory
- I do not expect to be saturating a GbE connection, but do not know what to expect using network datastore for ESXi
- Since I have 3 free GbE ports on each machine for ESX/FN comms, would it make any sense to get LACP / teaming setup?
- I've read some on LACP, and know enough that I don't know enough to make any decisions
- I'm thinking that there's probably not a good reason to go down this road, and why invite dragons to play if not needed
- I also want to use this as a replication target for critical data on my main FN box
- My existing FN data is on non-encrypted pools.
- Can I replicate to an encrypted area on this system?
- This would mainly be for disaster recovery in the event of catastrophic failure of my existing RaidZ2 pool on my main FN
- Would I be able to set up multiple of the above, for cross backup with other FN boxes?
- I have 2 other people considering setting up FN, and cross hosting critical backups for offsite storage.
I think this is all of the major questions and concerns I have.
Did I miss anything obvious, or are there other things I should be watching out for?
Suggestions welcome, and thanks for any help