BUILD Looking to build kicka.. NFS server

[vrod]

Yeah that's also a good option, I've just got 4 of them for around that price. :D Beasty CPU's!!!

 

[yourmate]

Put it this way, buying two of those would net you an unreasonably fast box at a bargain-basement price.

Thanks for taking the time! The only reason I am still hesitating that I have second thoughts about whether I spend my budget towards the right direction...
Here is why: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...server-experience-disaster.42543/#post-276717

 

[jgreco]

At $70 each you're not going to find a better CPU bargain, I think. You also don't need to buy two, if you just buy one, that's probably fine too. Notice that failing to populate one socket of a dual board will disable some of the PCIe slots.

 

[yourmate]

At $70 each you're not going to find a better CPU bargain, I think. You also don't need to buy two, if you just buy one, that's probably fine too. Notice that failing to populate one socket of a dual board will disable some of the PCIe slots.

I am actually more than happy to buy two CPUs - the problem is I am not 100% confident that this is the right way to go... The NAS will probably fly but I'm a bit worried that it'll be hugely overpowered for my usage. My main concern is not the $400 more extra initial investment (obviously I could spend that on drivespace and/or extra memory) but the overall 1) extra running cost and 2) the - supposedly - noisier running due to the dual processor wattage as it'll be in a home environment.

What's your take on those?

I do understand your bias towards the "ideal" build but as we don't want people to build a FreeNAS with 2GB memory and 8TB pool without RaidZ probably the other extreme is almost as bad ;)

 

[jgreco]

So your question is actually about the choice of board?

Yes, the dual boards will tend to use more power. Sorry, that's just a fact of life when powering more silicon.

Populating it with only a single CPU is FINE, you can absolutely do that, it doesn't actually reduce the power used by the BOARD, but it totally eliminates the power from the second CPU. But it also wipes out some PCIe slots, as I said.

If you want low power, you don't have any business being in E5-land. The E3's are better at low power, and the Xeon D's are even more remarkable, and then there's the Avoton C2550/2750 stuff on the power sipping end of things.

 

[yourmate]

I have not considered this but this might be a good idea - also I can pop in an extra CPU whenever I need to.
I've checked the board's manual a couple days ago and it looks fine for me as it would not restrict my usage at all (except a few PCIe as you've said which I'd not be using anyway). So that's OK with me.

 

[vrod]

Hey all,

I don't intend to raise the topic from the dead without reason, I just wanted to let you know that I proceeded with my idea and got the storage box going. The box right now has the specs:

- Xeon E5-2620
- 128gb memory
- 8 x 2TB 7,2K Sata drives (pool1)
- 2 x 100GB S3700 SSD's (mirror zil for pool1)
- 2 x 800GB 750 Intel SSD's (pool2)
- Redundant PSU where each phase goes to an independent UPS

So far I've been running SCST with fibre channel on top of it but I got a really good deal on a 10gbps switch so now I'm moving to NFS. I've been looking around on how to configure the best performant NFS server with ZFS and I have a few questions:

- I want to add a Samsung 950 Pro as L2ARC, will this make sense? Currently I have limited the ARC to 64GB as SCST also needs some memory for the VFS cache, but this will go away
- Would adding 2 extra S3700 SSD's for ZIL in pool1 (to create a RAID10 ZIL) give extra performance?
- Would it be an issue to use this host as a VM hypervisor as well? I would add about 64GB on top of what it already has and swap out the E5-2620 with 2xE5-2640's. I would then give out 96gb to ARC and 96GB to OS + VM's.
- Any good tunings to do in regards to NFS?

Thank you

 

[jgreco]

Generally speaking we don't encourage people without extensive hypervisor experience to use FreeNAS as a VM.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...nas-in-production-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/

 

[vrod]

I work as a virtualization engineer so I can get around things, no problem. However the VM option was just thinking out loud, as I thought I could use the host itself for more than just holding storage. The 3 other points are more relevant for me I think, would anyone have suggestions?

 

[jgreco]

Then this is for you.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

If you read that and go "well duh" possibly mixed with some "good to knows", then you're probably good to go.

 

[vrod]

I went ahead for now and kept the system as it is, but holy moly it paid off to upgrade to 10Gb! I can now utilize some of the NVMe power that the pools have. :) Took an atto speed test from inside a ESXi VM. Thanks for all the help!