Deciding on NAS+Hypervisor solution

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weust

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Aug 15, 2014
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I've bought a second hand Dell T320 with the intention of making it my home NAS and hypervisor AIO.
And for a while now I've been trying to figure out which flavour I want to run.
Of course I will try out several, but I might forget some.

Ones I will be testing out for sure are FreeNAS, Promox VE 5 and SmartOS.

I want to avoid setups where I have to build everything from scatch, like installing the OS then setting up the storage and the hypervisor.
Not too keen on SmartOS right now because of the way updating is handled.

Anyway, hoping to get some new ideas here.
 

pricklypunter

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Nov 10, 2015
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Ultimately only you can decide what fits best with your use case. I would say if this is purely for all things storage, then a pre-built solution might be what you want, it's certainly easier to roll out, but for standing up a grown up hypervisor and running several VM's etc, you'll probably want something much more flexible from the get go. For that I would say you should embrace the "pick an OS and add what you need to it to achieve your goals" way of thinking. It's certainly more hands on, but that's where both the challenge and the fun live. Choose your playground :D

Incidentally, NAS4Free is an obvious option missing from your shortlist :)
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Personally, I have been using more Proxmox VE. The reason is simply that with Debian underneath it is (really) easy to do whatever you want with the box. Hardware compatibility is very good as well. Also, the next step is clustering. If you want to cluster machines, then Proxmox VE is probably the best bet.

If you really want just a simple NAS solution with a nice GUI and you want to run a few VMs here and there, then FreeNAS is a better choice.
 
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weust

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The more hands approach is what I try to avoid. Too easy to screw things up and loosing all my data.
Really want to avoid that ;)

The VMs I am running right now on my Hyper-V 2016 server are simple things. Nothing heavy CPU or memory wise.
Just had a look at NAS4Free, and it uses VirtualBox. That always give me a bad taste from when I used it on desktops...

Of course I will go with whatever fits me best, hence I will try out at least FreeNAS and Proxmox VE.
Setting up the storage and some VMs, like a Pi-hole, should get me a proper view of both.
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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When I came up with the AiO idea nearly ten years ago the only viable solution for a solid VM environment + a full featured ZFS NAS environment was ESXi + storage pass-through + a Solarish based storage OS, first OpenSolaris, then NexentaCore then OpenIndiana.

This is what I still use and prefer today mainly with OmniOS, a free Solaris fork that comes with quite the smallest RAM needs of all appliances and a "native" ZFS environment.

SmartOS is like OmniOS a Illumos distribution. It is a VM/ Cloud environment like ProxMox but without the storage options that you get with a full featured ZFS webmanaged NAS appliance software. Proxmox and SmartOS have ZFS but only for those good at CLI without the need of all the advanced storage appliance features.
 
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weust

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Webbased management is a must for me.
As a Windows admin I don't mind using PowerShell at all, and Linux and FreeBSD servers is fine too for the simple things, but for the rest I want a GUI. Don't want to dick around on a command line creating a storage pool or VM when I can click it together in a few seconds.

Not to sound rude, but I'm not that much of a masochist.
 

weust

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Good idea, plus I know ESX.
Only downside is upgrading. The update ISO are behind a support contract.

Ran into that last year when I was testing 6.5 and wanted to update. Luckily, where I worked at the time they had a support contract so I could obtain that ISO file.

Or is the community here fri ndly enough to pass along such files? ;)
 

Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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Code:
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
#update to latest
build_url="https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml";esxcli software profile update --depot $build_url --profile `esxcli software sources profile list --depot $build_url |grep ESXi-6.5|grep 2018|grep standard |sort |tail -1 |cut -d' ' -f0` --no-sig-check
takes care of my ESX updates needs. Not major releases though
 

weust

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Rand_, if it can do U1 and U2, etc then I'm OK with it.

gea, but not U2 AFAIK. Plus, using my account I cannot download U1 nor U2. Mentions a manual download and then I'm denied.
Can only download ESXi 6.5.0 from somewhere in 2016.
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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The VMware page is a pain.
You must add 6.5U1 to your account first.

When I tried last time I was faster using Google to find U1
Google: Download VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 6.5 U1
 

ViciousXUSMC

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Nov 27, 2016
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My all in one started with Freenas and mostly FreeBSD jails within to get some virtual workload done.
When I started to need a few VM's using Beehive I found I was not really satisfied with how resource allocation was working (could not get enough cpu power to my NVR VM) so I blew the whole thing away and rebuilt with ESXi and then virtualized Freenas.

This worked perfectly and I am really happy with the result.

I was able to do this without losing over 12TB of data on the NAS, simply passed through my HBA via VTx to Freenas, did a fresh install and imported my configuration. It saw all my disks just as if it was still the original bare metal install.
 

weust

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Seems I didn't receive a few reply notifications.

gea, I will see if I can add it to my account, and also try the search way.

ViciousXUSMC, importing the config is the config from FreeNAS or the ZFS config because FreeNAS saw the disks and handled it on it's own? (kinda, perhaps).


I just flashed my eBay'd H310 to IT mode firmware and I got two 120GB Intel DC S3510 SSDs in.
Will use those on the H710i in a RAID1. Just to be on the safe side :) Got them in a Delock 5.25" bay which can hold up to six 2.5" drives, or two 2.5" plus one 3.5" drives.
The H310 came with a two port SAS/SATA cable. Very handy now.
 

ViciousXUSMC

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I imported my Freenas configuration, mostly for the settings of jails, ip, dns, etc.
I could have simply imported my volume and it would have found it without any import of configuration as there is some breadcrumbs on the disks themselves that allow freenas to detect an old zpool and re-import it.

The only time I think this might get complicated is if you used encryption.