Freenas build with virtualization (slightly complicated)

[Dave2500]

Im not sure if this is even applicable, if not please remove,

Anyway my old freenas box (lenovo t140) is just not up to the task anymore (not enough drive capacity in the case)

What i was thinking of doing was making, or buying one server for a slew of things:
Going to run:
Unifi Controller (very low power)
pfSense
Blue-Iris (6- 8mp security camera's, hooked into its only drive)
freenas with a plex plug in (going to run hopefully 8-10tb drives using a HBA card

would you build one? (like supermicro board, xeon etc, or look at the used market, any idea what cpu i might need in order to beadle to do this much?

Any suggestions appreciated
Its only in a home environment so its not super critical

 

[Yorick]

The Blue Iris software is going to be the one that gives you trouble, because it wants Win10 and an NVidia GPU. Everything else could run on FreeNAS itself, and not need a whole lot of resources.

If you put everything into one box, it’ll be a VMWare or Proxmox setup with direct passthrough: HBA for FreeNAS, GPU for Blue Iris. I just don’t know that that’s worth it.

You could consider an inexpensive small form factor Win10 machine just for Blue Iris, and then run FreeNAS on your hardware of choice.

There’s a very good resource in this forum about “up to 32GB” eBay components. That will get you a very functional FreeNAS server.

Or you can clone a variant of the build in my signature, which gives you Plex hardware transcoding on more modern Intel iGPU, at a considerably higher build price.

Either build will get you a perfectly functional FreeNAS for your purposes, including the video surveillance software if you are going for the layered virtualization approach.

I am personally not a fan of layering like that with a passthrough. Not because it doesn’t work - it does, and quite well. Only because you are adding complexity. You’ll need to weigh whether the hardware savings and space savings are worth the additional setup work, and that will depend on whether you are already familiar with that kind of virtualization and passthrough, and if not, whether climbing that learning curve sounds like a fun project.

There is an argument to be made that transcoding 4k video on the fly is foolish, and you should just keep an SDR 1080p version around alongside the 4k. It’s a good argument.

At the same time, there are those stubborn few in this forum who just want that hardware transcode. People have had mixed results with hardware transcode below a v5 xeon or equivalent i5/i7, though.