BUILD NAS for VMs and media

[rmb938]

I am wanting to build NAS for my homelab that will store my ESXI VMs as well as a few TB of videos, music, random documents ect..

I spent the last 4 months researching, reading documentation, hardware guides, iSCSI vs NFS and I think I finally got a build together but I still have a few questions.

* CPU: Xeon E3-1230v5 3.4Ghz
* Ram: 4 x 16GB ECC Kingston Value RAM KVR21E15D8
* Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSL-CF-O
* Boot Drives: 2 x Samsung 850 Pro 256GB Mirrored
* SLOG: 2 x Samsung 850 Pro 256GB Mirrored (I know these do not have power loss protection but there doesn't seem to be anything that does within the same price range)
* Data Drives: 8 x 4TB Western Digital Red (Possibly adding 2 more for a total of 10 if it increases storage space significantly)
* PSU: SeaSonic X-850W

The motherboard has a LSI controller on it but I could not find any information on if it needs to be flashed and/or how to configure it as a HBA.

I am not really too sure if I should split up the drives into 2 different volumes, one for vms and one for all other data, or keep it all as one big volume. If I do go with multiple volumes what would be the best storage vs reliability raid for the non-vm volume.

I know that where ever the VMs end up living should be a mirror raid or possibly a striped mirror, using iSCSI with sync=always and a SSD backed SLOG. I know with iSCSI the recommendation is to not use more than 50% of the volume capacity, that is why I am thinking about having a vm specific volume to have as much space as possible for other data. I don't see my VMs using more than 5TB anytime soon and a lot of it will be duplicate data.

I have seen many posts asking about debupe and most of the time the response is "it uses a ton of memory so don't bother". I was not planing on using dedupe but I figured I would at least mention it. I find recommendations for at least 5GB ram per 1TB of dedupe so this build should have enough... but I am going to leave that answer to someone with more experience.

 

[CraigD]

I spent the last 4 months researching, reading documentation, hardware guides

I would use Crucial RAM from the QVL list

* Boot Drives: 2 x Samsung 850 Pro 256GB Mirrored

If you have them fine, FreeNAS loads to RAM on boot so this is extreme overkill

The motherboard has a LSI controller on it but I could not find any information on if it needs to be flashed and/or how to configure it as a HBA.

Firmware ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/Driver/SAS/LSI/3008/Firmware/

I am not really too sure if I should split up the drives into 2 different volumes, one for vms and one for all other data

I would

I have seen many posts asking about debupe

I know little of it, all I know is it cannot be changed later

I also have never used SLOGs

Have Fun
EDIT: Get a UPS
PS I have not done IT professionally for 20 years

 

[Ericloewe]

FreeNAS loads to RAM on boot

Not quite.

this is extreme overkill

Still very true, though.

* SLOG: 2 x Samsung 850 Pro 256GB Mirrored (I know these do not have power loss protection but there doesn't seem to be anything that does within the same price range)

SLOG without power loss protection is much worse than no SLOG and sync disabled. Why? Reliability is just as bad, but it's much slower.

a lot of it will be duplicate data.

Don't count on that. Or rather, don't count on it being very useful in terms of dedup ratio.