Hello all,
I have been running a fairly basic FreeNAS setup on an old machine I had lying around for the past year and seems to be working great as a test/proof of concept for my needs as far as NAS storage goes.
Now I have been able to save up some funds to do an actual server-parts grade build. I have been having trouble trying to find concrete information on whether or not the parts that I found will work for my needs or not, so I came to here. Now, I have read many of the warnings and posts about virtualizing FreeNAS and appears that if I follow the steps provided in those posts and make sure to have the controller for the drives setup as passthrough with VT-d, then all should be fine.
Uses for this machine:
Now onto the parts list: (http://pcpartpicker.com/list/js6QVY)
It would be nice to stay within the $500-$1000 price range for my budget. Later on, when I need more RAM, I can just purchase additional 16GB sticks to run with. With only the 2x2TB mirror, 8GB has been running just fine for my current uses, so I would have almost 8GB left for VMs, which I do expect to be expanding at some point.
Now, my main questions are:
EDIT: I guess I should also mention that I am planning to have a small SSD (120GB?) in this build to install ESXi and for sure FreeNAS onto. Then any VMs that I am running, will run from the storage pool that FreeNAS provides as either an NFS or iSCSI connection to ESXi as a secondary datastore. If any of the VMs need faster performance, then they can be moved to the SSD datastore at that time.
I have been running a fairly basic FreeNAS setup on an old machine I had lying around for the past year and seems to be working great as a test/proof of concept for my needs as far as NAS storage goes.
Now I have been able to save up some funds to do an actual server-parts grade build. I have been having trouble trying to find concrete information on whether or not the parts that I found will work for my needs or not, so I came to here. Now, I have read many of the warnings and posts about virtualizing FreeNAS and appears that if I follow the steps provided in those posts and make sure to have the controller for the drives setup as passthrough with VT-d, then all should be fine.
Uses for this machine:
- FreeNAS storage for backups of machines at home, storing movies, and other random data that I do not use frequently.
- Running VMWare's ESXi as the virtualization environment
- In a separate VM (Ubuntu probably) running a plex server to serve the movies and other media stored in the pool
- Development/Testbed VMs to play around with and setup test environments in
- Possibly more VMs to come later as I find other needs/uses
- May or may not put pfsense in here too
Now onto the parts list: (http://pcpartpicker.com/list/js6QVY)
- Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5 3.4GHz (~$252)
- Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSL-CF (~$254)
- 16GB of DDR4-2133 ECC ram from either Crucial/Samsung (whichever is available at the time of purchase) (~$90 for one 16GB stick)
- Power Supply: SeaSonic 450W SSR-450RM (~$74)
- Chassis: I will be using a spare ATX case that I have lying around
- UPS: APC BE550G (~$57)
- Hard Drives: reusing my 8 month old WD Red 2x2TB drives as a mirror, later on when my data needs increase I will upgrade to 6x2TB or 6x4TB drives depending on price and data needs at that time for use in a RAIDZ2 pool
It would be nice to stay within the $500-$1000 price range for my budget. Later on, when I need more RAM, I can just purchase additional 16GB sticks to run with. With only the 2x2TB mirror, 8GB has been running just fine for my current uses, so I would have almost 8GB left for VMs, which I do expect to be expanding at some point.
Now, my main questions are:
- Running FreeNAS virtually with this board, is it possible to passthrough the built-in LSI SAS controller to the FreeNAS VM?
- Am I able to flash the LSI controller to IT mode to make it behave as just a simple HBA (as I want to make sure I can give the drives to the FreeNAS VM as raw individual disk drives so ZFS can do its job)?
EDIT: I guess I should also mention that I am planning to have a small SSD (120GB?) in this build to install ESXi and for sure FreeNAS onto. Then any VMs that I am running, will run from the storage pool that FreeNAS provides as either an NFS or iSCSI connection to ESXi as a secondary datastore. If any of the VMs need faster performance, then they can be moved to the SSD datastore at that time.
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