I run FreeNAS 11.3 under ESXi 7.0 on Supermicro X11DPG-QT with SATA and an Optane 900p passthrough for 7x 8TB drives in RAID Z2 and caching.
Currently the VMs (a mix of desktop and server installations for home use) are hosted on the same M.2, vanilla nvme that ESXi boots from.
I want to build a dedicated pool for the VMs and serve it back to ESXi over iSCSI. In the future I plan to passthrough a Mellanox ConnectX 3 PRO NIC to serve VMs running on other systems.
The Samsung 980 PRO seems like a good choice and I prefer it for reasons, some of which are non-technical. But I would go another way if there is a reason to avoid the 980 PROs.
- The description of Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus NVMe 4.0 Gen4 says that there is an utility that can reformat the drive in either 512-byte or 4K sector size. Is there such an utility from Samsung? Does FreeNAS/TrueNAS prefer/require a specific sector size?
- Are there any other special configurations needed for the 980 PRO?
- Should I put a partition on the Optane as a L2ARC in front of the 980 PRO RAID Z1, considering the specific use - VMs? The 980 PROs have much higher sequential speed, but the Optane has much better latency.
- I know that X11DPG is PCIe v.3 and that the 980 PRO is v.4. I want to get the v.4 now to be ready for future upgrades.
- If relevant, I plan to put 3x 980 PROs in an ASUS PCIe v.4 x16 card (X11DPG bifurcates the slot into x4x4x4x4) and will use the 4th x4 for the Optane M.2 to U.2 cable.
Any other recommendations?
Thanks!
Currently the VMs (a mix of desktop and server installations for home use) are hosted on the same M.2, vanilla nvme that ESXi boots from.
I want to build a dedicated pool for the VMs and serve it back to ESXi over iSCSI. In the future I plan to passthrough a Mellanox ConnectX 3 PRO NIC to serve VMs running on other systems.
The Samsung 980 PRO seems like a good choice and I prefer it for reasons, some of which are non-technical. But I would go another way if there is a reason to avoid the 980 PROs.
- The description of Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus NVMe 4.0 Gen4 says that there is an utility that can reformat the drive in either 512-byte or 4K sector size. Is there such an utility from Samsung? Does FreeNAS/TrueNAS prefer/require a specific sector size?
- Are there any other special configurations needed for the 980 PRO?
- Should I put a partition on the Optane as a L2ARC in front of the 980 PRO RAID Z1, considering the specific use - VMs? The 980 PROs have much higher sequential speed, but the Optane has much better latency.
- I know that X11DPG is PCIe v.3 and that the 980 PRO is v.4. I want to get the v.4 now to be ready for future upgrades.
- If relevant, I plan to put 3x 980 PROs in an ASUS PCIe v.4 x16 card (X11DPG bifurcates the slot into x4x4x4x4) and will use the 4th x4 for the Optane M.2 to U.2 cable.
Any other recommendations?
Thanks!
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