BUILD FreeNas + bhyve

[acoustician]

Usage

• Server for me, NAS(FreeNAS as hypervisor) for family.
• Plex + SMB + transmission + backups

Build

• Motherboard: SuperMicro X11SSH-F-O
• CPU: Intel Pentium G4400
• CPU Cooling: Zalman CNPS11X Performa+ PURCHASED
• RAM: 16Gb DDR4 2133MHz Samsung ECC
• PSU: Fractal Design Newton R3 600W PURCHASED
• HDDs: WD Red
• Boot Drive: 60Gb SSD Silicon Power S60 2x16Gb Transcend JetFlash 710 PURCHASED
• RAID Card: LSI 9211-8i
• SAS to SATA: SFF-8087 (correct?)
• Chassis: Fractal Design Node 804 PURCHASED

Question: What do you think of my build?

 

[Spearfoot]

Seems okay, but you'll run of disk space very quickly with only 2 x 1TB drives.

 

[jgreco]

Your gameplan suggests that you'll be using the LSI 9211-8i in IR mode to provide a redundant datastore for ESXi.

In that case, you only have a single 1TB virtual disk available to the system, and there's really no value to FreeNAS on such a platform as you need redundancy to make that work. The redundancy would mean you'd need to make something like two 400GB vmdk's and mirror them together.

 

[acoustician]

Your gameplan suggests that you'll be using the LSI 9211-8i in IR mode to provide a redundant datastore for ESXi.

In that case, you only have a single 1TB virtual disk available to the system, and there's really no value to FreeNAS on such a platform as you need redundancy to make that work. The redundancy would mean you'd need to make something like two 400GB vmdk's and mirror them together.

i'm going to use LSI 9211-8i in IT mode with 2 disks in mirror mode and buy 6x6 TB disks for RAIDZ2 later

 

[jgreco]

i'm going to use LSI 9211-8i in IT mode with 2 disks in mirror mode and buy 6x6 TB disks for RAIDZ2 later

Then what's the purpose of the 9211-8i? Why not just use the system board?

 

[acoustician]

Then what's the purpose of the 9211-8i? Why not just use the system board?

to let FreeNAS use disk drives directly via passthrough
i read that i cant do this with onboard controller
or there is the easier way to make FreeNAS work as VM?

 

[Spearfoot]

to let FreeNAS use disk drives directly via passthrough
i read that i cant do this with onboard controller
or there is the easier way to make FreeNAS work as VM?

Ah! You didn't tell us you were going to virtualize FreeNAS on VMware! Yes, your approach -- passing an HBA through to the FreeNAS VM via VT-d -- is the best way to do this.

 

[jgreco]

Ah! You didn't tell us you were going to virtualize FreeNAS on VMware! Yes, your approach -- passing an HBA through to the FreeNAS VM via VT-d -- is the best way to do this.

Silly me, I missed that he had a boot SSD. You kinda burn out after awhile staring at these things. Sigh. Sorry.