Don't take this the wrong way imanz, but you *really* need to figure out what you are wanting to do and go with it. Your last thread was 'wishy-washy' about what you wanted to do, then you created this thread and you've already discussed that you are committing to 32GB of RAM and maybe 64GB of RAM. Now you're talking about a second setup.
How about doing some more research and come up with a *solid* setup. Don't wishy-washy it and fill in the blanks as you go. Figure out *exactly* what you want to do and then post that.
Changing your expectations with every post is wasting everyone's time.
My apologies, I am under other deadlines and English is not my first language; sometimes I jump around and expect others to follow!
The project is simple, the hardware I listed originally is what I currently have assembled and working. During this time I had finished a couple other projects and had a few boards laying around which I was deciding between returning or building into a cluster of ESXi nodes (supermicro avoton boards). A large part of my project stemmed from moving to a schedule of working from home instead of the office, and having the same test environments would be perfect. For work the majority of my development and testing will result in memory intensive load on the VMs. As far as other requirements, I am fairly liberal about specifics as long as it gets the job done, the biggest two things I start to look at is power usage and noise, both of which are very important especially in a machine that runs 24/7 like the freeNAS build.
I did not do nearly enough research into iSCSI and using freeNAS in this way past it being possible. I was simply hoping to get it running and go as other deadlines are slowly encroaching. Now that I have read some additional information and these posts I am starting to have a better picture in mind.
Considering the cost of DDR3 ECC SODIMMs being described as "unicorn blood" I'd go with keeping your homelab on the simpler side and letting work pick up the tab for the expensive testbeds. ;)
That was never out of the question either way ;) . My test environment at work is more than sufficient but working from home (always) and being reliant on my internet connection makes me very uneasy. I guess its time to price something out.
Either way I wanted to thank everyone on here for their time, it has been very helpful. Out of curiosity, does this project offer any type of "entry" tier for showing support? I know Pfsense offered a $99 membership which is a great price level for supporting a project that has provided you some good stuff like this one!
