Expanding functionality for my FreeNAS server

[qoob]

Hey there!

Currently I am running FreeNAS from a USB-stick in a server grade system with a Xeon E3-1240 v5 @ 3,50GHz, 32GB of ECC RAM on a Supermicro X11SSM-F motherboard. The storage is 4x4TB WD Reds setup as RaidZ2. In addition I have Plex media server setup through a jail, and it uses a separate SSD for caching purposes. I need my NAS for basic NAS stuff (storing files over a network) and a very essential part is being able to use plex.

Now I have a new feature I need from my server, and I'm not sure how to tackle it. I've gotten into coding neural networks, and I wanted to turn my server into a dev machine in addition to the plex + NAS functionality.

So basically I would need e.g. Ubuntu installed as the main OS on the server, so it could access the GPU directly. Then I would need some way to setup a NAS with redundancy, that has access to the 4x4TB WD Reds. Lastly, I would need to be able to setup Plex Media server in such a way that I could access it through my network and use the media stored on the NAS.

So currently one option I was thinking about was Ubuntu on hardware, VirtualBox instance of FreeNAS and Plex in a jail on the FreeNas VM instance. I could putty into the ubuntu machine. The key issue here seems to be that VirtualBox doesn't allow direct access to the HDDs for FreeNAS so I've no idea if RaidZ would even work.

Any suggestions? I've grown to like FreeNAS and gotten used to it by now, but is such a setup possible in one machine?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[danb35]

What you're talking about may be possible under ESXi--that's the only method that would be anywhere close to recommended.

 

[Arwen]

Not sure what you are thinking, since the CPU you purchased does not have a GPU. Or were you going to add a video card?

The IPMI graphics are quite low end. More than enough for simple GUIs and to manage PC BIOS. But, you probably can't get it to do what you want. In fact, if I remember some of the ASPEED chip specs, it uses only 1 PCIe lane.

 

[rvassar]

Any suggestions? I've grown to like FreeNAS and gotten used to it by now, but is such a setup possible in one machine?

I'm going to stick my neck out here and suggest a second machine. I suspect you're more interested in the GPU than the CPU here, so any old desktop with a big enough power supply, and a full power rated PCIe x16 slot should be able to handle the Ubuntu part of it.

 

[giu1644]

First of all thank you to everyone for your help, it is greatly appreciated. As I don't want to risk losing my data, that pretty much means I need FreeNAS on the hardware from what I've read around. ESXi has been proven to work (though not for this exact use-case) but setting it up is a pain and still there are no guarantees the boat will sail smoothly onwards.

I have a 980Ti that is retiring, and the idea was to add that to the server - forgot to add that one to the OP.

I also have a very old setup of i7-3770K + mobo + RAM retiring from another system, so I figure I should just buy the bare necessities to get that going and go for a separate system.