Hello all,
I lurk here on the regular and on /r/homelab on reddit to gain new insight into my lab... this is one time I think I need to ask for help though.
I currently have a Dell R710 that has dual L5639, 48Gb RAM, PERC H710, and I currently have 2x Intel 520 SSDs, and 5x WD Se 3Tb drives (4 in use) in the server. I have been seeing my RAID5 crawling like a slug over gigabit ethernet with write cache enabled at around 10MB/s but since the server is always in use, have never been able to correct it.
Currently ESXI boots off USB, with pfSense, Windows 2012 R2, and a Windows 7 VM running off the SSDs in RAID1. The media storage is the RAID5, which was RDM straight to the Server 2012 VM which shares it over SMB.
For my newest revision, I bought a Sonnet Tempo PCIe SSD adapter which I will use to add my VM storage SSD internal to the case, allowing me to free up the other 2 hotswap bays. I will add my 5th drive in, and hopefully find a 6th on sale. My thought was to replace pfSense with Sophos UTM, since pfSense 2.2 has not been finalized, still run my Server 2012 R2 VM, and another Windows 7 or Ubuntu VM... which is where my Plex server runs (made it easy to auto-login to the networked drive and auto-load Plex).
Should I be looking into FreeNAS to share up my data storage this time over NFS or iSCSI on a virtual switch? Would Windows Storage Spaces be an acceptable substitute? Would adding an SSD cache drive to either setup help performance in the long run?
I lurk here on the regular and on /r/homelab on reddit to gain new insight into my lab... this is one time I think I need to ask for help though.
I currently have a Dell R710 that has dual L5639, 48Gb RAM, PERC H710, and I currently have 2x Intel 520 SSDs, and 5x WD Se 3Tb drives (4 in use) in the server. I have been seeing my RAID5 crawling like a slug over gigabit ethernet with write cache enabled at around 10MB/s but since the server is always in use, have never been able to correct it.
Currently ESXI boots off USB, with pfSense, Windows 2012 R2, and a Windows 7 VM running off the SSDs in RAID1. The media storage is the RAID5, which was RDM straight to the Server 2012 VM which shares it over SMB.
For my newest revision, I bought a Sonnet Tempo PCIe SSD adapter which I will use to add my VM storage SSD internal to the case, allowing me to free up the other 2 hotswap bays. I will add my 5th drive in, and hopefully find a 6th on sale. My thought was to replace pfSense with Sophos UTM, since pfSense 2.2 has not been finalized, still run my Server 2012 R2 VM, and another Windows 7 or Ubuntu VM... which is where my Plex server runs (made it easy to auto-login to the networked drive and auto-load Plex).
Should I be looking into FreeNAS to share up my data storage this time over NFS or iSCSI on a virtual switch? Would Windows Storage Spaces be an acceptable substitute? Would adding an SSD cache drive to either setup help performance in the long run?