Seeking recommendations to [re]do it right

jallen

Cadet
Joined
Nov 28, 2016
Messages
6
I am researching options to build a new system and would appreciate recommendations.

Current setup:
  • Motherboard Intel BOXDH67BLB3 - I bought it new 8 years ago for my first build and realizing now what a mistake it was (doesn't support ECC memory)
  • CPU Core i3 3220T 2.8 GHz - Another mistake and it probably drove my making the one above - I was naively overly concerned with power usage
  • RAM 32GB DDR3 non-ECC :-(
  • PSU Corsair CX430
  • HBA HP H220 LSI 9207-8i - Purchased this last year to extend storage capacity - thanks to info from these forums this has been working great
  • Boot Drives two Intel 320 series 40GB SSDs - Purchased about a year ago and working great
  • Storage Drives - six 4TB WD Red and six 2TB various mfg (not all in use, but would like to put them into use)
  • Case Antec 300 - an ok case, but not enough room for all the drives and have not been able to make good use of the 5.25" bays
  • I have been running FreeNAS and plugins for Plex and Transmission. Recently moved Plex to an old core i7 Windows machine because of poor performance watching/pausing/ffwd live TV that was also being recorded. This may have been an issue with my DVR Tuner settings (having the Homerun Extend transcode the stream) and player settings, but I like having Plex outside of a jail/plugin because it's easier to keep up to date.
  • I store workstation backups, documents, and media libraries on a RaidZ2 Pool (six 4TB drives) and various temp/replaceable files on Pools composed from the 2TB drives
Desired future state:
  • I want to run TrueNAS virtualized and some additional VMs as well
  • New (to me) motherboard, cpu, and RAM - I like the idea of a used Supermicro board, but not sure what my best bet would be there -X9, X10, X11. Would like IPMI, don't need 10Gbe at this time
  • PSU - Thinking I will probably need more power than what I currently have. It is best to buy new PSUs or are used ones good?
  • Drives - I believe my storage and boot drives are good - should I get something additional to run ESXi on and/or the other VMs on?
  • Case - will need something that can house all the drives
  • I want to run TrueNAS virtualized and some additional VMs as well
I've been reading and looking on eBay at all the different used SM boards and intel cpus. Would really appreciate any recommendations on what the current sweet spot is for $/performance on this type of gear and also any other recommendations I should consider.

Thx!
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2015
Messages
1,150
You can swoop up a board/chip/ram on ebay. I'm using this very board and working great. Actually this is a very nice deal as I paid easily that for just the processor.

Look for a case with lots of 5.25 bays and convert them to several extra 3.5 spots using these. They work great. I'm using a Fractal XL with 12x 3.5 and an additional 6 spots by conversion.
 

jallen

Cadet
Joined
Nov 28, 2016
Messages
6
You can swoop up a board/chip/ram on ebay. I'm using this very board and working great. Actually this is a very nice deal as I paid easily that for just the processor.

Look for a case with lots of 5.25 bays and convert them to several extra 3.5 spots using these. They work great. I'm using a Fractal XL with 12x 3.5 and an additional 6 spots by conversion.
Thanks @John Digital
X10SLL-F is one of the boards I have been looking at
 

ThreeDee

Guru
Joined
Jun 13, 2013
Messages
698
Setup in sig has been working great and it takes the waay cheaper RDIMM's instead of UDIMM's .. it initially came with 32GB of ECC RDIMM's, cost $125 with cpu/mobo/ram .. sold the RAM and got 4 x 16GB's . video card was about $10, and HBA about $25 off of Ebay.

If it's just a personal home server, then just sharing another option for yuh. I wasn't sure about it when I first got it being a Chinese knock off and all .. but it's been flawless since I set it up about 6 or so months ago running 24/7. I'll have up to 8 users streaming stuff at a time from the 25-30 friends and family "subscribers" I have that have access to my Plex stuff.

Only thing with it is that it doesn't recognized M.2 SATA drives (bought a 32GB one to initially be the boot drive).. but the cheap NVMe SSD is working great as the boot drive.
 

ChrisRJ

Wizard
Joined
Oct 23, 2020
Messages
1,909
Depending on your virtualization needs, RAM may be the factors with the biggest lever. Of course, prices and availability depend on your location, but it seems that overall DDR3 ECC RDIMMs are currently the sweet spot. I got a number of 16 GB sticks off ebay for just 20 Euros here in Germany very recently. With e.g. a Supermicro 9SRI-F, which has 8 memory slots, that makes a relatively 128 GBs, if maxed out.
 

Inxsible

Guru
Joined
Aug 14, 2017
Messages
1,123
Not sure how invested you are in ESXi, but another option is Proxmox.

I was using ESXi from v5.x and switched over to Proxmox sometime after using ESXi v6.7 for a short time
 

jallen

Cadet
Joined
Nov 28, 2016
Messages
6
Setup in sig has been working great and it takes the waay cheaper RDIMM's instead of UDIMM's .. it initially came with 32GB of ECC RDIMM's, cost $125 with cpu/mobo/ram .. sold the RAM and got 4 x 16GB's . video card was about $10, and HBA about $25 off of Ebay.

If it's just a personal home server, then just sharing another option for yuh. I wasn't sure about it when I first got it being a Chinese knock off and all .. but it's been flawless since I set it up about 6 or so months ago running 24/7. I'll have up to 8 users streaming stuff at a time from the 25-30 friends and family "subscribers" I have that have access to my Plex stuff.

Only thing with it is that it doesn't recognized M.2 SATA drives (bought a 32GB one to initially be the boot drive).. but the cheap NVMe SSD is working great as the boot drive.
Thanks @ThreeDee
I do like the cheaper RDIMMs
Not sure I trust a Chinese knock off... this is for home use, so content is not very interesting, but nonetheless I’d probably be more comfortable with a used SM board
 

jallen

Cadet
Joined
Nov 28, 2016
Messages
6
Depending on your virtualization needs, RAM may be the factors with the biggest lever. Of course, prices and availability depend on your location, but it seems that overall DDR3 ECC RDIMMs are currently the sweet spot. I got a number of 16 GB sticks off ebay for just 20 Euros here in Germany very recently. With e.g. a Supermicro 9SRI-F, which has 8 memory slots, that makes a relatively 128 GBs, if maxed out.
Thanks @ChrisRJ!
Seems like DDR3 ECC RDIMM is indeed the sweet spot which would narrow me down to X9 and maybe some X10 (not sure)
 

jallen

Cadet
Joined
Nov 28, 2016
Messages
6
Not sure how invested you are in ESXi, but another option is Proxmox.

I was using ESXi from v5.x and switched over to Proxmox sometime after using ESXi v6.7 for a short time
Thanks @Inxsible
Not invested at all in ESXi - actually have only used virtualbox and old version of vmware workstation.
It seemed like there were some good ESXi guides on the forum so figured safest to follow those as closely as possible. Are there any guides you found helpful for Proxmox? Why’d you switch to Proxmox?
 

John Doe

Guru
Joined
Aug 16, 2011
Messages
635
Thanks @Inxsible
Not invested at all in ESXi - actually have only used virtualbox and old version of vmware workstation.
It seemed like there were some good ESXi guides on the forum so figured safest to follow those as closely as possible. Are there any guides you found helpful for Proxmox? Why’d you switch to Proxmox?
+1 would like to know why switch to proxmox
 

ThreeDee

Guru
Joined
Jun 13, 2013
Messages
698
Thanks @ThreeDee
I do like the cheaper RDIMMs
Not sure I trust a Chinese knock off... this is for home use, so content is not very interesting, but nonetheless I’d probably be more comfortable with a used SM board
Yeah, I was leery at first as well ..but it was the cheap RDIMM's that pushed me to "take a chance" ..I'm glad I did .. I was running UDIMM's on an intel server board .. and using a USB to SATA adapter to run an SSD for boot drive because I had all my sata ports tied up.

anyhoo .. good luck with whatever you decide on :cool:
 

Inxsible

Guru
Joined
Aug 14, 2017
Messages
1,123
Why’d you switch to Proxmox?
+1 would like to know why switch to proxmox
I switched for the following reasons:
  1. I am using this for my home VM server. -- not in an Enterprise environment
  2. Proxmox is based off of Debian and I am pretty comfortable using Linux as all my desktops/laptops have Archlinux installed on them
  3. Proxmox is free for use and even though ESXi also has a free version -- the free version has restrictions like number of vCPUs limited to 8
  4. I like to work in the CLI for many things and for me it is easier to just use ZSH on Debian than to learn new commands & their syntax etc for esxcli
  5. I wanted to get into containerization more than virtualization and Proxmox allows VMs and CTs. I was not invested in Docker at that time, so I had the option of going with Docker or LXC -- I chose LXC.
  6. VMWare ESXi documentation -- at least for me-- is difficult to comprehend because even for minor things they have a wall of text before they get to the meat of the issue. Initially I was not very well versed with ESXi, and so had to go searching for many minor things. So this could be a "user" issue -- but because I was more comfortable with Linux, I found I could deal with the issues in Proxmox a bit more easily since I could just search for "how to do X in Debian" rather than focus only on Proxmox
  7. If Dell spins off VMWare -- and a company like Oracle buys it then there is an off chance that it might go the Java or MySQL route with licensing issues etc.

The 1 advantage that I thought ESXi has that because it's so prevalent in the Enterprise, you would probably have more forums dedicated to ESXi than to Proxmox.

Also, I have a 1U, 4-bay server and I ran ESXi from a USB drive and used all 4 drives for storage. From my research, running Proxmox from an USB drive was not recommended, so I just installed it to one of the HDD partitions. Although I ran FreeNAS from an USB -- even though it's not recommended -- for a good 5 years without a single issue, so maybe Proxmox would have been fine too :)
 
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