BUILD New Build Review

[Eric Milan]

Hello,

I'm picking out the parts for a FreeNAS build I'm doing and would like reviews/recommendations.

Case - NZXT Source 210 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case
PSU - Corsair CX 430W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
Mobo - Supermicro X10SLL-F Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
CPU - Intel Pentium G3220 3.0GHz Dual-Core Processor
RAM - Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 ECC Memory
Boot - SATADOM-MV 3ME MLC 32GB
HDD - already have. 3 1TB hard drives from different manufacturers. All the same rpm. Running in a raid 5 now. Going to buy another 3 1TB drives soon.

Uses - Storage of all types of data from movies to pdf files. Will use mainly nfs and ftp services. Would like to test using the FreeNAS box as storage for virtual machines. I use a kvm host with local storage right now. Not sure if I would use nfs or iscsi.

I feel like this build will work pretty well for my purposes.

 

[joeschmuck]

Would like to test using the FreeNAS box as storage for virtual machines.

What do you mean, storage or run the VM from FreeNAS? I store VM images on FreeNAS and copy those back to my main computer when I want to run them. This is different from running a VM from FreeNAS. If you want to run a VM from FreeNAS, I'd say you need much more RAM. I'm not sure if the CPU is fast enough either, someone else might be able to chime in.

 

[Eric Milan]

Well I'm not sure really. I would like to keep everything centralized if possible. At my work we use ISCSI between a Dell Equallogic SAN and 2 two ESXI host. The host our diskless. I really like this setup. I frequently reload my desktops/laptops and VM host just because I like to try out new things but I also like getting up and run as quick as possible.

 

[tvsjr]

I'm in the middle of building a FreeNAS for VM storage myself. I would suggest doing a fair amount of reading... you're going to need to do a lot more work to make FreeNAS perform suitably for a VM store. Things like:
Striped mirrors for HDDs
A SLOG (otherwise the sync writes will cause bad performance)
Additional CPU and RAM

 

[Eric Milan]

Well then for now because I can't really spend to much more I'll just use the FreeNAS box for storage everything else but the VM images. Honestly my VM images are pretty small. All of them right now are just Linux VMs with no more than 10GB of disk space. I can just put an ssd or something in the VM host box and have something setup to back up the images nightly.