Home lab

[elhoim]

Build’s Name: Cthulhu's Lab
Operating System/ Storage Platform: ESXi
CPU: 2 x SIX-CORE XEON E5649 2.53GHz 12MB L3 cache 5.86 GT/s FSB 32nm 80W Processors
Motherboard: 8-DTH-iF
Chassis: SC847E16 (36x 3.5" disks trays!)
Drives: 16*WD RED NAS 6TB (WD60EFRX)
RAM: 128GB RAM DDR3 ECC
Add-in Cards:
Other Bits:

Usage Profile:
My idea is put ESXi on it, use it mostly as an ESXi server + NAS.
If I outgrow the CPU power or the RAM for the ESXi lab part of things, I will probably buy another server and connect it to this one with Infiniband.

For the storage, I thoug about having a VM with omnistor or something else to address storage and pass-through the PCIe RAID cards to create ZFS volumes exported as iSCSI back to ESXi and SMB/CIFS to other machines at home.

The questions I have, are:

1. What RAID cards or JBOD cards would you recommend for omnistor to create ZFS pools?
2. I thought of creating my first ZFS pool with Z2 over 16 WD REDs. Would it VM Lab type of performance (random I/O?) by adding an SSD as caching?
3. The machine is loud as hell, any recommendations on how to lower the noise? Would a noise cancelling rack be a good idea?

Any other recommendations?

 

[CreoleLakerFan]

Wow! That's a lot of horsepower! I can't see you running out of CPU or RAM any time soon. For your controller, look at an IBM M1015. They are OEM/rebadged LSI conyrollers, and can be flashed with stock LSI firmware. They run ~$100 on eBay new.

 

[sboesch]

You have gobs of cpu and ram!!! for ZFS, I second the IBM M1015. I have two of them in my setup.

 

[elhoim]

For my home lab, since I work in IT security, i will try to replicate an enterprise environment: active directory, file share, multiple workstations (winXP, win8, etc...) to be able to test things.