Old Honeywell NVR case + SuperMicro x10slh-f FreeNAS+ESXi all-in-one

[nick31]

Hello, I am planning to convert my existing hardware into home server with the following:

E3-1286 V3 Xeon
TS140 mobo 03T8873 - 1 PCIe x16, 1 PCIe x4, 1 PCIe x1, 1gb Intel NIC
Dell H310 flashed to LSI IT mode HBA in the PCIe x16 slot.
32GB ECC Ram (currently I have only 24GB)
Cisco Intel i350-based quad NIC in the PCIe x4 slot.
4xWD RED NAS 8TB SATA
Intel X25-M 80GB MLC SSD
Intel S3700 100GB SSD
UPS

I will use X25-M as a boot drive for ESXi and datastore for FreeNAS VM.
I will passthru HBA to FreeNAS with 4 HDDs and S3700 connected.
I will configure HDDs as a zpool of 2 mirrors for the usable storage of 16TB.
I will overprovision S3700 and use 20GB (less? more?) for the SLOG of that zpool.
I will give FreeNAS VM 16GB RAM.
I will make some of that storage available to ESXi via NFS (or should i use iSCSI?) to use it as a datastore for other VMs.

I am going to run some usual home VM stuff like plex, seedbox, pfsense etc. and some other Linux/MS VMs to play with.
I am also going to use FreeNAS to store media library.
I will have backups of the critical stuff on a separate media.

Any recommendations?

Thank you in advance.

 

[nick31]

Well, since there are 0 recommendations in the last 20 hours, I assume my build is decent hehe

 

[bigphil]

Yes, it seems decent enough for what you're planning to do. Storage performance wont be that great with the hdd types and quantity that you have, but it'll work for a home AIO setup.

 

[nick31]

Yes, it seems decent enough for what you're planning to do. Storage performance wont be that great with the hdd types and quantity that you have, but it'll work for a home AIO setup.

Thank you for the reply.
I am adding S3700 for the SLOG device to aid with VMs performance. Unfortunately adding more hdds or P3700 exceeds the amount I am ready to spend at this moment because doing so involves total revamp - different mobo, cpu, case etc.

In your opinion, if I add 2 SSDs in zfs mirror exclusively for VMs datastore and use S3700 as a SLOG for this pool, will I notice better VM performance comparing to datastore on the HDDs? Will the difference be drastic?

 

[bigphil]

Yes, performance would be quite a bit better. I did the same thing on one of my home FreeNAS box's...went from 6 SAS drives in mirror setup to just two SSD's in a mirror. I also use Intel S3700's (400GB version) as my SLOG devices. The SSD's for my mirror are Micron M500DC's 800GB.

 

[nick31]

Does it really matter what size the S3700 for SLOG device is since the SLOG itself is around 20GB?

Also, may I use one S3700 as 2 SLOGs for different zpools (HHD for data, SSD for VMs) considering that these pools will not be stressed simultaneously?

Thank you.

 

[bigphil]

It doesn't really matter how large the SSD device is, although the more space they have, the better performance they typically have too. I wouldn't recommend carving it up to have the same device serve two different pools. The data pool will probably be ok with just the on-pool ZIL.

 

[nick31]

So the "server" is up and running. I had to rethink my strategy in terms of future expansion and speed.
I am no longer using TS140 mobo. I got X10SLH-F instead with IPMI and PCIe 8/8/4, dual NIC.
What else is going to change is that I will keep HDDs but I will get rid of all the SSDs except for the one for esxi boot/freenas vm datastore. Instead, I am waiting for Intel DC P3700 to arrive in mail. This will be my SLOG/L2ARC/SWAP. And I will have 4 extra HDD bays available for storage increase. Updates later.

 

[nick31]

Ok as promised here is the update. I bumped total ram to 32Gb, gave freenas 10gb. With my usage, I do not hit swap. If I will at any point I will give freenas more ram.
I installed P3700, OPed to 36GB - 20gb for slog, 16gb for swap.
Some pics here.
Before slog (tested at 4gb cuz had no space):

After slog (similar results at 4gb):

"Server" itself:

 

[jgreco]

Oh! That's an old AICIPC chassis I'm pretty sure. Nice to see things reused.