First FreeNAS build: performance vs power consumption

[J_Nerdy]

Long time lurking...

I have decided to move away from AMAHI as my home media/pseudo-NAS solution and am intrigued about the parity/security that ZFS presents.

Use Case:

- 24/7 operation as back up service
- media server (plex)
- streaming locally 2160p
- streaming across WAN multiple 1080/720 streams
- transcode as necessary (rare)
- Host multiple VM instances (2-4)
- File serving/syncing (owncloud)
- VPN service
- download client
- smtp server (possibly, not definitely)
- web server (low resource, text and image)
- crashplan service

Having done a fair amount of reading, I am trying to determine the best CPU/MOBO combo to deliver performance at the lowest TDP possible (E3-1285l v4 was what I was initially looking at...though the 15xx series with IRIS looks powerful at nice per watt ratio)

Ideally storage specs would be:
- Samsung evo boot drive
- 6 x 4tb WD reds (5400) -- with room to grow, and a desire to be hot swappable (HBA card if necessary).

32Gb ECC to support the storage with some overhead.

The goal is to remain powerful, without crushing consumption during idle or low resource use.

Is low TDP Xeon overkill?

Any suggestions would be great.

Thank you.

 

[maglin]

When you say host VMs do you mean through virtual box? Or do you mean VMs data stores? It's a big difference.

Really for either you are asking a lot out of a little. Forget about owncloud on FreeBSD. It will saves you days of struggle. Running it on Linux is far easier in every regards.

Yes you need a XEON for what you want to do.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[J_Nerdy]

instances through virtual box (with guest additions)... though running datastores through WAN is a "possible" use case. I could run owncloud through a VM instance, per your suggestion (I will pass on the days of struggle :) )

Fair point, I am asking a lot. I should have prefaced better...what is the minimum power consumption build. I can spend reasonable coin for a rock solid system that meets use case.

 

[Evi Vanoost]

The main thing I see missing is how many clients you have for each of your services concurrently as well as how much each of your streaming services actually consumes. 1080p or 2160p doesn't mean anything if you don't know the actual bandwidth (your setup won't handle multiple raw 1080p and 2160p streams).

So let's say you have 3-5 streams of data concurrently (simultaneously reading MP4's and doing some backups which is fairly common). That will probably strain a single disk set (a mirror or RAIDZ/RAIDZ2) to it's limits. So 3 mirrors would definitely be advisable. Obviously huge ARC caches will help depending on your usage patterns. If you have gigabit, any processor on the market now will be able to handle that. I've found personally, unless you go Atom, the CPU is not going to be the limiting factor. You're going to be strained in IO and RAM before your CPU is starved.

Now if you add other things. Each VM consumes memory and CPU that is no longer available to ARC/ZFS. ZFS really likes to use all available resources. You're using perhaps 2-4GB for 2 VM's? How much IO's do they consume even when 'idle'? I know BitTorrent Sync and Crashplan while indexing or streaming can use up a lot of resources and OwnCloud uses MySQL databases that uses synced writes. So if you want to add all those services, you're probably going to do some twiddling, make sure you don't do full backups when you use the media server etc or limit how much read/writes BTSync and Crashplan consume, perhaps point MySQL to use your SSD mirror.

 

[J_Nerdy]

Locally, uncompressed...

Over WAN, between 5-10 Mbps.

VMs are more luxury, than, necessity...have a workstation that can be utilized.

 

[adrianwi]

Forget about owncloud on FreeBSD. It will saves you days of struggle. Running it on Linux is far easier in every regards.

I set-up a test NextCloud server in a FreeNAS jail using @Joshua's ownCloud guide (which can be found in the How To... forum) in an hour or so. It's pretty much tried and tested, and certainly should take 'days of struggle' :D

 

[Evi Vanoost]

Uncompressed 1080p ProRes = ~300Mbps, 2180p goes at 500-1.5Gbps.

Your network is physically unable to stream most of the 4K uncompressed spectrum, I also don't see why unless you're a film production house, just compress it.

You may be able to stream a single 1080p movie from your machine given your data is mostly sequential. But any sort of heavy workload on the drives a 5400RPM will only give ~10MB/s (~80Mbps) with 20ms latencies.