What OS to use?

[sim871]

Greetings,

I would like to build a home file server that will store movies and music. It will only serve Mac clients that are all running Yosemite. I am keen to run ZFS and I may consider running a Win 8 VM. Below is the hardware I have available. I am looking for suggestions on how best to set this up.

• Supermicro X10SL7-F-O Micro ATX DDR3 1600 LGA 1150 Motherboards
• Intel Xeon E3-1230V3 Haswell, 3.3GHz
• Kingston Technology ValueRAM 32GB DDR3 1600MHz PC3 12800 ECC CL11
• SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+sas Pcie 2.0
• SeaSonic SS-400FL2 400W 80 PLUS Platinum Fanless Power Supply
• Bunch of repurposed HDDs

Darrin

 

[Patrick]

Would running ESXi be an option for you Darrin?

 

[sim871]

Would running ESXi be an option for you Darrin?

Sure or hyper-v. I'm new to both and partial to which ever is easier to get up and running!

 

[HellDiverUK]

Hyper-V is better for passing through drives. ESXI is better for passing through PCI and USB devices.

 

[namike]

Are all your drives that you are wanting to use in your NAS/SAN connected to your onboard SAS controller and/or PCI-E add on HBA? If so, you can install ESXi and pass through via VT-d the LSI controllers to your NAS VM and then run whatever other VM's you need. This is the exact board, CPU, setup that I have currently and it works great.

 

[sim871]

Are all your drives that you are wanting to use in your NAS/SAN connected to your onboard SAS controller and/or PCI-E add on HBA? If so, you can install ESXi and pass through via VT-d the LSI controllers to your NAS VM and then run whatever other VM's you need. This is the exact board, CPU, setup that I have currently and it works great.

Thanks from the reply. I intended to connect all the 'NAS' drives to the onboard SAS controller. Do you run esxi from a HDD or usb stick? Do you use Nappit?

 

[sim871]

Hyper-V is better for passing through drives. ESXI is better for passing through PCI and USB devices.

Hyper-V is better for passing through drives. ESXI is better for passing through PCI and USB devices.

Thanks for the reply.
D

 

[legopc]

Thanks from the reply. I intended to connect all the 'NAS' drives to the onboard SAS controller. Do you run esxi from a HDD or usb stick? Do you use Nappit?

Esxi doesnt use a lot of space so you can install it on a usb drive

 

[namike]

Thanks from the reply. I intended to connect all the 'NAS' drives to the onboard SAS controller. Do you run esxi from a HDD or usb stick? Do you use Nappit?

Yes to both questions. I have a old 2GB USB drive plugged into the internal header that I installed ESXi on. I'm using the pre-built Napp-it VM with the LSI passed through to it. Pretty simple setup that works well. If you have any questions let me know.

 

[spyrule]

Run Xpenology, it will serve the media very well, offer time machine backup and as for win8 vm run it on one of the macs when needed.

 

[Deci]

esxi, pass the lsi card through to a storage vm with vt-d, depending on the xpenology you might need to pass the disks through rather than the card, i ran into lots of reported disk errors when i tried to run 6 disks off a 9211-8i in my N54L but YMMV (i changed from openindiana (solaris) to xpenology for my media storage just recently, its a nice interface and can be setup easily for time machine support, transcoding to mobile devices and more easily) xpenology only needs ~4gb of ram to function well and that leaves you with 26-28gb free for virtual machines, you can also do iscsi internally for vm storage or just add some extra drives depending on how you want to run it.

With ZFS are you looking at going a solaris/illumos based OS or something like freenas? (they suggest you dont run freenas as a VM but if you are passing the LSI card to it directly it shouldnt matter)

 

[spyrule]

If you plan to run Xpenology as a VM, I'd passthrough the entire controller. This allows Xpenology to perform proper SMART monitoring and other disk functions correctly. Note: You do NOT need a RAID card for Xpenology, as it uses its own custom software raid (that actually has very good performance, and redundency).

 

[mrkrad]

Or you can run a VM of OSX server and get the best performance and filesystem compatibility for the mac clients!