I've been doing a bunch of testing with different storage platforms and media. In the process I've collected quite an assortment of drives, HBAs, RAID cards and enclosures and now I'd like to consolidate it and am curious to hear how some of you would do it. I'd like to maximize performance and (hopefully) save some power. This thing idles at about 300w right now, which makes the room its in very warm (and annoys the wife).
I use the system as a lab for testing VMs and networking stuff, but it also stores all of my business files, a couple hundred GB of 3rd tier offsite backup for an architecture firm and 5 TB of plex media server. Windows Server 2012r2, FreeNAS, Server 2016 and a couple linux VMs run 24/7. None of this data is irreplaceable and I have a very robust backup strategy in place already. I also have google fiber
Here is the collection of stuff I've accumulated and how its currently set up:
VMware 6.0 is the hypervisor and that is not going to change
Host:
My first thought is to kill the SA120 and its drives and reconfigure FreeNAS to use the (8) 3TB Drives in parity rather than mirror and give it (2) HGST 400s to use as SLOG and kill the Nytro. That nets about 15TB usable as iscsi. I'd also leave (5) 960GB SSDs connected to Freenas as a high performance datastore. (I want to kill the Nytro and SA120 because they are both power hogs)
Thanks for any advice you may have on how you'd do this.
I use the system as a lab for testing VMs and networking stuff, but it also stores all of my business files, a couple hundred GB of 3rd tier offsite backup for an architecture firm and 5 TB of plex media server. Windows Server 2012r2, FreeNAS, Server 2016 and a couple linux VMs run 24/7. None of this data is irreplaceable and I have a very robust backup strategy in place already. I also have google fiber
Here is the collection of stuff I've accumulated and how its currently set up:
VMware 6.0 is the hypervisor and that is not going to change
Host:
- Intel S2600 in an Intel 4308 Hot-Swap chasssis (I've also added a 4-bay cage, so the main chassis has (12) 3.5"/2.5" bays)
- (2) E5-2670 (I can probably disable one of these now)
- 96GiB RAM
- 12 bay Lenovo SA120 DAS
- One more 4-bay SATA cage
- (2) LSI-2008-8I HBA
- (1) LSI-2008-8E HBA
- (1) LSI-9260-8I RAID with BBU
- (1) 800 GB LSI Nytro Warp Drive
- (5) 960 GB SSD (assorted Samsung, Hitachi, Dell)
- (2) 200GB Hitachi SSD
- (4) HGST 400 GB SAS SSD
- (1) Intel 100GB S3700
- (8) WD Re 3TB HDD
- (7) Hitachi 7k3000 2TB HDD
- (1) 4TB and (1) 5TB 5200 rpm drives (use for transfers and cold backup)
- (2) 2008-8I HBA are passed through to FreeNAS
- One has the (8) 3TB Drives
- One has (5) 960 GB SSD and (3) HGST 400 GB SSD
- 2 volumes, one HDD (mirrored) and one SSD (raidz) are shared back to ESXi via iSCSI
- 2 of the Nytro drives are passed through to FreeNAS to use as striped SLOG
- 2008-8E is passed through to Windows Server 2016 and connected to the SA120 with
- (7) 2TB HDD
- (2) 200 GB SSD
- This created a tiered storage spaces volume, shared back to ESXi
My first thought is to kill the SA120 and its drives and reconfigure FreeNAS to use the (8) 3TB Drives in parity rather than mirror and give it (2) HGST 400s to use as SLOG and kill the Nytro. That nets about 15TB usable as iscsi. I'd also leave (5) 960GB SSDs connected to Freenas as a high performance datastore. (I want to kill the Nytro and SA120 because they are both power hogs)
Thanks for any advice you may have on how you'd do this.
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