heisenberg1977
Cadet
- Joined
- Nov 25, 2012
- Messages
- 9
I've read so many hardware recommendation threads lately my head is spinning. My cash is extremely hard earned and a decision to spend over $1000 on a test box does not come lightly. So before going through with this I would love confirmation if this solution will work.
Goals: I may use this hardware for 1. Freenas zfs, 2. VMWARE ESXi Vsphere whitebox. Looking for hardware that will fully support both including; full VT-d for PCI passthrough support.
Budget: Was hoping to keep it within $1000 - $1200 total. This is based that I already have some 7200 RPM SATA drives lying around and would use these in the meantime while I save more drives at a later time.
Config: Basically my main goal is to get a Freenas ZFS going. I would have 5 x 7200 RPM SATA drives. 2 of the hard drives in a ZFS mirror that I would use as a file share / backup for my public network on LAN-A. The other 3 drives in a RAIDZ that will be used as an ISCSI target on my private network LAN-B. So I would need a dual-homed NIC as Freenas will be shared between 2 subnets.
Questions: I've compiled some of the main questions I've asked over the last while researching hardware:
Does the hardware support both Freenas and ESXi?
If using an ISCSI target will my performance be sufficient using 7200 RPM SATA drives?
In the event I would like to upgrade to better drives will my motherboard support a SAS/SATA controller such as IBM ServeRAID M1015 or Highpoint RocketRaid.
I wanted to keep the box as small form factor as possible. I originally wanted to buy desktop mATX hardware to keep my cost down but I am not sure if this is the way to go. I find it confusing to research the PCI slots on these boards. Do they support the SATA/SAS controller card? Are there enough available slots if expansion is required?
Here is the hardware I originally picked
Motherboard
ASRock Z77 Pro4-M (Support full VT-d and has Realtek 8111e NIC natively supported by ESXi) My main question is does it support one of the SAS/SATA disk controllers listed above?
Case: Lian Li PC-V354B - mATX form factor that holds 7 x SATA 3.5" drives + 2 x SSD's.
CPU - Intel Core i7-3770S - Support full VT-d and low power alternative to the 3770
CPU cooler - Cooler Master GeminII S524
RAM - 2x 8GB DDR3. Whatever is the best sale at the time
PSU - Seasonic X-460 Modular 460W PSU
Basically on my other RIG I will be running Virtualbox on a Windows 7 host with an Ubuntu VM for surfing, torrents, media playback. I have another Ubuntu Server VM that runs a MySQL database / Apache for testing purposes only. I've never had an ISCSI configuration so I'm curious about maybe hosting the DB on the ISCSI target. I may also build another ESXi whitebox and use this Freenas build as the external storage. I just want to make sure that the performance will be tolerable with the 7200 RPM SATA drives. There will not be many multiple write attempts to the drives. The heaviest I/O activity that I can think of would be somebody performing a backup to the ZFS mirror along with the MySQL database in use on the RAIDZ that will be used to store real time data from my Snort IPS.
If the regular Sata 7200 RPM drives will be sufficient then I do not have to worry about controllers or SAS drives and the ASRock MB should work for my needs. I want to avoid spending this type of cash only to be extremely disappointed by the ZFS performance (Especially important for the ISCSI target). I would rather save more cash and go with server class hardware like Supermicro, although I can't afford at the moment.
All suggestions and recommendations are greatly appreciated.
Goals: I may use this hardware for 1. Freenas zfs, 2. VMWARE ESXi Vsphere whitebox. Looking for hardware that will fully support both including; full VT-d for PCI passthrough support.
Budget: Was hoping to keep it within $1000 - $1200 total. This is based that I already have some 7200 RPM SATA drives lying around and would use these in the meantime while I save more drives at a later time.
Config: Basically my main goal is to get a Freenas ZFS going. I would have 5 x 7200 RPM SATA drives. 2 of the hard drives in a ZFS mirror that I would use as a file share / backup for my public network on LAN-A. The other 3 drives in a RAIDZ that will be used as an ISCSI target on my private network LAN-B. So I would need a dual-homed NIC as Freenas will be shared between 2 subnets.
Questions: I've compiled some of the main questions I've asked over the last while researching hardware:
Does the hardware support both Freenas and ESXi?
If using an ISCSI target will my performance be sufficient using 7200 RPM SATA drives?
In the event I would like to upgrade to better drives will my motherboard support a SAS/SATA controller such as IBM ServeRAID M1015 or Highpoint RocketRaid.
I wanted to keep the box as small form factor as possible. I originally wanted to buy desktop mATX hardware to keep my cost down but I am not sure if this is the way to go. I find it confusing to research the PCI slots on these boards. Do they support the SATA/SAS controller card? Are there enough available slots if expansion is required?
Here is the hardware I originally picked
Motherboard
ASRock Z77 Pro4-M (Support full VT-d and has Realtek 8111e NIC natively supported by ESXi) My main question is does it support one of the SAS/SATA disk controllers listed above?
Case: Lian Li PC-V354B - mATX form factor that holds 7 x SATA 3.5" drives + 2 x SSD's.
CPU - Intel Core i7-3770S - Support full VT-d and low power alternative to the 3770
CPU cooler - Cooler Master GeminII S524
RAM - 2x 8GB DDR3. Whatever is the best sale at the time
PSU - Seasonic X-460 Modular 460W PSU
Basically on my other RIG I will be running Virtualbox on a Windows 7 host with an Ubuntu VM for surfing, torrents, media playback. I have another Ubuntu Server VM that runs a MySQL database / Apache for testing purposes only. I've never had an ISCSI configuration so I'm curious about maybe hosting the DB on the ISCSI target. I may also build another ESXi whitebox and use this Freenas build as the external storage. I just want to make sure that the performance will be tolerable with the 7200 RPM SATA drives. There will not be many multiple write attempts to the drives. The heaviest I/O activity that I can think of would be somebody performing a backup to the ZFS mirror along with the MySQL database in use on the RAIDZ that will be used to store real time data from my Snort IPS.
If the regular Sata 7200 RPM drives will be sufficient then I do not have to worry about controllers or SAS drives and the ASRock MB should work for my needs. I want to avoid spending this type of cash only to be extremely disappointed by the ZFS performance (Especially important for the ISCSI target). I would rather save more cash and go with server class hardware like Supermicro, although I can't afford at the moment.
All suggestions and recommendations are greatly appreciated.