Repurposing dedicated FreeNAS box as home desktop—good or terrible idea?

[SRSR333]

Hello everyone.

I was planning to build a desktop for more 'consumer'-ish purposes like rendering, web surfing and gaming, and the thought struck me: could I repurpose my FreeNAS box? It has potential to be a fairly powerful desktop system, given its current specs:

ASRock Rack E3C236D2I mini-ITX motherboard
Intel Pentium G4500 CPU
1 x 16 GB DDR4 ECC 2133 MHz UDIMM
Fractal Design Node 304
2 x WD Red 3 TB 5400 RPM drives
1 x SanDisk Cruzer Blade 16 GB boot drive

I was planning to purchase a used Xeon E3 v5 CPU (haven't exactly decided which one) to replace my puny Pentium while still keeping the ECC capability. Then I was planning to add an nVidia GeForce GTX/AMD Radeon RX video card as well, hook up a monitor and peripherals, and using the entire machine as a desktop, possibly with a hypervisor running Windows and FreeNAS. I was also thinking of adding a couple of 4 TB drives, and re-creating my entire volume with RAIDZ1, of four drives in total (2 x 3 TB, 2 x 4 TB). I also encode a fair bit of video, and I have a ton of raw video left to encode which I currently do on my notebook. I like the idea of having a proper Xeon handling all that, and offload everything to the server-cum-desktop.

Is this a good idea, or should I leave my FreeNAS box well alone (save the CPU upgrade)?

 

[Dice]

should I leave my FreeNAS box well alone (save the CPU upgrade)?

At present you own a textbook FreeNAS box. You're best advised to leave this box alone. Then design a system specifically to the <other needs>.
A household will always find some use for a state of the art FreeNAS.

 

[Stux]

Alternatively you'll build yourself a science project.

It may be interesting, it will require experimenting, and it may blow up ;)

Node 304 cases are designed to take big graphics cards.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I use about the same system as my gaming desktop. One problem is no audio so I had to get external dac. I really like using server hardware for my PC.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Stux]

One issue I can imagine, in order to do this you'll need to use a Type 1 hypervisor (ie ESXi) as FreeNAS's bhyve can't do GPU pass-through yet. The best way to pass the disks through is to pass the controller, ie an HBA, but you only have one PCIe slot, so you can't pass an HBA through and add a graphics card.

So, the next best way is to pass all the sata ports through to the FreeNAS instance. I'm not sure if you can pass just a few through.

And if you pass all the sata ports through... how do you boot ESXi?

Off an M.2 pcie nvme?

 

[SRSR333]

One issue I can imagine, in order to do this you'll need to use a Type 1 hypervisor (ie ESXi) as FreeNAS's bhyve can't do GPU pass-through yet.

That's what I was thinking—use ESXi for both FreeNAS and Windows.

The best way to pass the disks through is to pass the controller, ie an HBA, but you only have one PCIe slot, so you can't pass an HBA through and add a graphics card.

So, the next best way is to pass all the sata ports through to the FreeNAS instance. I'm not sure if you can pass just a few through.

And if you pass all the sata ports through... how do you boot ESXi?

Off an M.2 pcie nvme?

Yup... My motherboard has an M.2 2230 slot, and Toshiba recently announced their 2230 128/256/512 PCIe SSDs, which I plan to purchase. Partition the SSD three ways—one for ESXi, one for FreeNAS, the last for Windows. I've also got an internal USB 3.0 Type-A port, which I can use for FreeNAS (or Windows) if it happens to not play nicely in a partitioned drive.

In retrospect, using a Mini-ITX motherboard with a C236 chipset is a waste of chipset—there aren't enough PCIe slots to fill up the lanes. Oh, well. At least I have a shoebox server.

 

[Stux]

You only have to have ESXi and FreeNAS on the M2. Windows can boot off an iSCSI or NFS share on the FreeNAS pool, which is shared back to ESXi, as I understand it.

That way your Windows install benefits from ZFS.

And I believe the FreeNAS boot disk can just be a VM image on the ESXi disk.

Again, as someone who's never tried, anyone else, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong :)

 

[SRSR333]

You only have to have ESXi and FreeNAS on the M2. Windows can boot off an iSCSI or NFS share on the FreeNAS pool, which is shared back to ESXi, as I understand it.

Do you mean that it's possible to create a dataset just for Windows on the FreeNAS system drive, which in turn will be a VHD in ESXi, which in turn will run off the SSD? That's... Slightly complicated, but I defer to you. I have never run hypervisors before. Does Windows as a guest OS need to support Hyper-V, i.e. do I need an Enterprise version of Windows?

This project is looking interesting, and finally having a decent Xeon and a GPU to boot is a very enticing idea. A pity that the motherboard hasn't got a DAC—I'll have to use HDMI/DP audio.

 

[Linkman]

I use about the same system as my gaming desktop. One problem is no audio so I had to get external dac. I really like using server hardware for my PC.

This is what I do now, for my desktop - Dell T20, the processor graphics are fine for my use case (which is probably better on the E3-1225 than the old video card in the box that was replaced), and I added a PCIe sound card to continue using my existing 5.1 speaker setup.
Now tempted to go to ESXi on it, run my Linux desktop in a VM, and then use VMs in ESXi rather than VMWare Player on Linux.

 

[SRSR333]

I'm looking at type-1 hypervisors, and I'm thinking Proxmox would fair better than ESXi for a small home solution.