My planned ESXi/FreeNAS/WHS2011 Build

[Skilty]

Having spent some time looking at hardware for an ESXi 5.0 server running FreeNAS 8.2 and WHS 2011 I have the following shopping list:

Fractal Design Define R3
430W be quiet! Pure Power L8 BN181
Gigabyte Motherboard GA-970A-UD3
AMD Athlon II X2 265 Socket AM3 Dual Core
2x4GB Corsair Value DDR3 PC3-10600 (1333)
2x3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 Barracuda 7200.14

Plus existing components:

2x2GB Corsair Value DDR3 PC3-10600 (1333)
4x3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 Barracuda 7200.14
3x1.5TB Samsung F3
1x2TB Samsung F4
1x120GB Western digital 2.5"
Intel Gigabit PRO 1000CT PCIe
HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 (JBOD or single disk mode)

I plan on passing through all the large hard drives to FreeNAS and creating vdevs with 2 drives (mirrored). Unfortunately I need to migrate the drives a few at a time rather than in one large batch.

The 120GB drive will pass through and be used for the WHS 2011 installation, used purely for iTunes Home Sharing.

This is to replace a HP Proliant N40L server which has been fantastic but now has too few hard drive bays.

Any thoughs?

 

[mende21]

Maybe consider an Intel cpu? They are more energy efficient than AMD currently. My freenas was my first Intel build for that reason.

 

[Skilty]

I guess the price differential between AMD and Intel offsets the energy costs as the AMD CPU is some £60 cheaper than an Intel CPU supporting vt-d. After reading I need vt-d to pass through the storage controllers.

The aim is to run FreeNAS in a VM along with Windows for iTunes to serve movies to AppleTV.