i5 + 6x 2tb + virtualbox + raid 5

[alexktz]

I've been using virtualbox to run FreeNAS 8 for a while now and am very satisfied with it's performance so far. It's tasked with a simple virtual disk and the odd time machine backup and windows share activity - nothing taxing and it works great.

My plan is scale this up somewhat. What's the best way to achieve what I want to do please?

I'd prefer to just keep it all in one PC. This is quite important as it is my main media PC and is always on already and don't want to add another box (however power efficient) due to financial constraints. Also it's specs are hardly tested in it's current use so seems most sensible to use it for everything!

i5 2500k, 8gb ram, win 7 x64, blu ray, 1x 2tb, 1x 80gb ssd. so plenty powerful enough to cope with a freenas virtual machine.


now with my plan of having 10tb addressable space in raid 5 i think i understand i'd require 6x 2tb drives. i'd buy a cheap raid card or two to provide enough pci slots (6 port ones are stupid expensive imho, and unaffordable for this project). what is (in the hive minds opinion) the simplest option of having these 6 drives available to virtualbox (maybe as raw disks?). would freenas be able to then cope with the software raid 5 parity stuff without too much impact on the rest of my system. or am i really better off getting a hardware raid card (really don't want to do this).

is virtualbox my best option for this project or might vmware be more suited?

 

[David.Fernando]

i5 2500k, 8gb ram, win 7 x64, blu ray, 1x 2tb, 1x 80gb ssd. so plenty powerful enough to cope with a freenas virtual machine.

as far as i know 8gb ram will "not" be sufficient. It will run "just" enough of the system, however, since you are wanting to run a VM enviroment, I would suggest having a min of 16gb ram and then going as far higher as your budget will allow. You need to allocate enough ram for your Host (min of 4-8gb) and then you would need at least 8gb for zfs2

if you are planning on running as a vm, you should consider running a linux os, as win7 will take a lot of the resources and be inefficient for a "server" instance.

 

[alexktz]

ok, windows has to be the OS because of windows media center running on it.

so, 8gb of ram is not enough for freenas in a VM to control the raid5. what about if i moved the raid5 to hardware? what then. would it be enough?

spotted this card ' highpoint rocketraid 2721 ' and it's at a reasonable price point.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/high...-sata-sas-4x-external-and-4x-internal-devices

 

[David.Fernando]

its not that is 8gb enough for freenas, but is it enough for the host. think of how your pc runs by itself with 4-8gb of ram, now you would add the requirement of running another os. freenas running zfs would like to have 8gb as a "minimum". Having a hardware raid card, would make no difference afaik.

 

[LAYGO]

If you think a complete system (sans drives, which you already intend to buy) is too much, consider a HP Proliant MicroServer N40L. I have one & they're fantastic. I got it for $250 with HDD/RAM ready to boot. Check out the reviews on the web as FreeNAS is a popular OS for it.

Just look at the popularity of this thread:
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=958208

 

[survive]

Hi alexktz,

I'm not exactly clear what the question is\what problem you are looking to solve, can you please provide more details on what you are trying to do?

One thing I do know...you can double your memory for about 40eur so I would certainly do that before I bought that HighPoint card.

-Will

 

[Brand]

would freenas be able to then cope with the software raid 5 parity stuff

ZFS does not allow a RAID 5 array. The closest equivalent to a RAID 5 array would be RAIDZ.

 

[David.Fernando]

@ alexktz
why would you want to run windows media center? is your FN box transmitting audio/video straight to your tv/receiver?