SOLVED Home Lab Build help needed

[adityaharsh]

I'm planning on building a new Home Lab Server with following components:
1. Intel Xeon E5 2650 V4 (12 cores)
2. Supermicro X10SRA (or X10SRA-F) Motherboard
3. Dell H330 PCIe Adaptor Card (already flashed to HBA Firmware) (From old build)
4. 32GB 2400MHz ECC RDIMM
5. 3X 4x10TB Seagate EXOS in RAIDZ1 with 2 drives as Hot spares
6. PNY 120GB SSD (Mirror) as Boot Pool

My Use-Case will be:
1. Plex Server
2. VMs of Windows, Linux (multiple for different use cases)
3. Host Nextcloud
4. File Sharing via SMB

Will this all be sufficient or do I need to take some other parts into consideration

 

[jgreco]

It isn't clear what your hard drive setup is intended to be. "3X 4x10TB Seagate EXOS in RAIDZ1 with 2 drives as Hot spares" is something I read as probably "three vdevs of 4x10TB each, with 2 drives hot spare" which equals 14 drives, which is an unusual number of drives.

Please be aware that RAIDZ1 is not recommended from a reliability perspective, as any drive loss compromises redundancy, meaning that the combination of a drive loss plus any read error elsewhere means that the data affected by that read error is lost.

Please also be aware that RAIDZ1 is highly suboptimal for VM block storage, though it will work for a small number of light duty VM's. See

The path to success for block storage

It seems like I haven't written a sticky for awhile, but just in the last week I've had to cover this topic several times. ZFS does two different things very well. One is storage of large sequentially-written files, such as archives, logs, or data files, where the file does not have the middle...

www.truenas.com

I strongly suggest making certain that you are not "slot-stuffing" the X10SRA, that is, putting in eight 4GB sticks of RAM. 32GB of RAM may be a bit tight for what you're doing, and you will want to leave open the option to expand to 64GB at least. This means you should be using four 8GB sticks (or even two 16GB sticks if you're worried about the future).

 

[adityaharsh]

It isn't clear what your hard drive setup is intended to be. "3X 4x10TB Seagate EXOS in RAIDZ1 with 2 drives as Hot spares" is something I read as probably "three vdevs of 4x10TB each, with 2 drives hot spare" which equals 14 drives, which is an unusual number of drives.

I'm using Fractal Design Meshify 2 which has 14 slots for 3.5" HDDs and 4 slots for 2.5" Drives (SSDs in my case)
So that's why the Odd number of drives.

Please also be aware that RAIDZ1 is highly suboptimal for VM block storage, though it will work for a small number of light duty VM's. See

Should I make a MIRROR Pool simply for VMs? In that case I'll dedicate 2 slots for VMs on SSDs in MIRROR config.

32GB of RAM may be a bit tight for what you're doing, and you will want to leave open the option to expand to 64GB at least. This means you should be using four 8GB sticks (or even two 16GB sticks if you're worried about the future).

My mistake, I mentioned 32GB beacause the shops have limited quantity and they'll provide only 1 per customer. This should get normal by July and I'll buy 3 more sticks making 128GB (Filling half of X10SRA) leaving room for future upgrades?

 

[jgreco]

Should I make a MIRROR Pool simply for VMs? In that case I'll dedicate 2 slots for VMs on SSDs in MIRROR config.

It's hard to know. You can do it on the RAIDZ and if you're happy with it, then you're happy. Just be aware of the possibility that you will not be happy with the performance. Since you can always fix it later, it doesn't hurt to try the RAIDZ.

This should get normal by July and I'll buy 3 more sticks making 128GB (Filling half of X10SRA) leaving room for future upgrades?

Then you're definitely doing the right thing there.

 

[adityaharsh]

One last thing will E5 2650 V4 be sufficient for Plex, 95% of my collection is 4K Blu-Ray HDR, will this CPU be able to encode and decode

 

[Jessep]

E5-2640 V4 or E5-2680 V4 (cores/memory bandwidth differences) would likely be better priced, your CPU choice would likely be more about how many streams (needed threads) or think about scale and use a GPU for transcoding.

 

[adityaharsh]

E5-2640 V4 or E5-2680 V4 (cores/memory bandwidth differences) would likely be better priced, your CPU choice would likely be more about how many streams (needed threads) or think about scale and use a GPU for transcoding.

GPUs that you would recommend for transcoding that I can find cheap in refurbished market?

Also, this may sound extremely silly but Xeon has no integrated graphics so for basic video out to install TrueNAS Scale do I need a Graphics Card?

 

[jgreco]

Most Xeon CPU's have no integrated graphics. As a result, Supermicro boards such as the X10SRA-F that include IPMI have to include a basic VGA adapter onboard in order to provide the IPMI. This is not "graphics" as meant by people used to GPU's or on-CPU Intel graphics support. It's basic 1990's grade VGA, capable of text and graphic modes, but not a graphical accelerator. It's just enough to allow a screen to be rendered, output on the VGA, and also sent over the network via IPMI.

 

[adityaharsh]

Most Xeon CPU's have no integrated graphics. As a result, Supermicro boards such as the X10SRA-F that include IPMI have to include a basic VGA adapter onboard in order to provide the IPMI. This is not "graphics" as meant by people used to GPU's or on-CPU Intel graphics support. It's basic 1990's grade VGA, capable of text and graphic modes, but not a graphical accelerator. It's just enough to allow a screen to be rendered, output on the VGA, and also sent over the network via IPMI.

X10SRA doesn’t include a VGA port but X10SRA-F does, so what I understood from this is that I won’t need any gpu to view the IPMI address if I purchase X10SRA-F but if I get X10SRA I’ll need one gpu to view setup