I picked up a Dell PowerEdge T630 from their Outlet that has a PERC H730 and 18 x 3.5" hotswap bays (dual quad cores and 16GB RAM and I have added 2 x Mellanox ConnectX 2 (10Gbit) single port cards.
I'm wanting to use this to hold my movie collection (currently around 10TB and growing with unconverted/uncompressed BluRay rips going usually between 12 and 25GB each).
I am planning to run a few of the Dell/Intel S3710's for an iSCSI target for my VMware VMs, and then several 8TB drives in a double parity (raid 6) for a share solution.
My old solution is a Synology DS2411. It works fine still, but cannot transcode 1080p on the fly (only has an dual core Atom 525 if memory serves). It is also fairly full (9 x 3TB HGST Coolspin drives and 1 hotspare (and 1 bad slot (but to have it repaired requires sending the whole unit back incurring probably 2+ weeks of downtime)).
I was thinking of running Xpenology on this new unit and putting the PERC in HBA mode (a setting in the PERC configuration and no need to reflash or so). Xpenology 5.2 worked fine with the 500GB drives that came with the server, but it wouldn't see the 4 x 8TB WDC MyBook shucked USB drives, even though the PERC and DRAC see it just fine.
I installed Windows 2016 Essentials Trial version to play with as it can run VMs (hyper-v (VMs would need to be uniquely licensed, but it seems to be available as an option to enable)). This version can also run an iSCSI target (natively). In this setup I'm using the H730's hardware raid capabilities and full support for Dell's OpenManage and such for monitoring hardware and software and such.
I'm familiar enough with hyper-v for virtualization, but it is a lot less elegant than VMware.
I have since found information about setting up Xpenology 6.0, which I may end up trying (I had previously run 5.2 and any attempted to upgrade to 6.0 led to a system with all network ports down and USB disabled (so I couldn't log in via the console either). On my DS2411 DSM 6.0 doesn't offer docker or virtualization, but possibly Xpenology 6.0 on this T630 does offer them. Synology's DSM 6.0 on systems with an x64 CPU offers BTRFS as well, with several features that ZFS offers as well (snapshots, bitrot protections, etc). I'm pretty sure Xpenology DSM 6.0 will also offer this.
I've considered options like FreeNAS, but ZFS' lack of granular expansion options (ability to add 1 drive at a time to an existing raid 6) makes it a non-option. And going raid 10 for a (mostly) movie repository/share is a waste of drive bays to me.
Other than trying to figure out Xpenology's DSM 6.0, does anyone have any other options that they can think of to do shares on software (or hardware) raid (5 and 6), with the option to expand the raid sets by 1 drive at a time when needed, and if possible run virtual machines (50-75% Windows VMs usually)?
I'm wanting to use this to hold my movie collection (currently around 10TB and growing with unconverted/uncompressed BluRay rips going usually between 12 and 25GB each).
I am planning to run a few of the Dell/Intel S3710's for an iSCSI target for my VMware VMs, and then several 8TB drives in a double parity (raid 6) for a share solution.
My old solution is a Synology DS2411. It works fine still, but cannot transcode 1080p on the fly (only has an dual core Atom 525 if memory serves). It is also fairly full (9 x 3TB HGST Coolspin drives and 1 hotspare (and 1 bad slot (but to have it repaired requires sending the whole unit back incurring probably 2+ weeks of downtime)).
I was thinking of running Xpenology on this new unit and putting the PERC in HBA mode (a setting in the PERC configuration and no need to reflash or so). Xpenology 5.2 worked fine with the 500GB drives that came with the server, but it wouldn't see the 4 x 8TB WDC MyBook shucked USB drives, even though the PERC and DRAC see it just fine.
I installed Windows 2016 Essentials Trial version to play with as it can run VMs (hyper-v (VMs would need to be uniquely licensed, but it seems to be available as an option to enable)). This version can also run an iSCSI target (natively). In this setup I'm using the H730's hardware raid capabilities and full support for Dell's OpenManage and such for monitoring hardware and software and such.
I'm familiar enough with hyper-v for virtualization, but it is a lot less elegant than VMware.
I have since found information about setting up Xpenology 6.0, which I may end up trying (I had previously run 5.2 and any attempted to upgrade to 6.0 led to a system with all network ports down and USB disabled (so I couldn't log in via the console either). On my DS2411 DSM 6.0 doesn't offer docker or virtualization, but possibly Xpenology 6.0 on this T630 does offer them. Synology's DSM 6.0 on systems with an x64 CPU offers BTRFS as well, with several features that ZFS offers as well (snapshots, bitrot protections, etc). I'm pretty sure Xpenology DSM 6.0 will also offer this.
I've considered options like FreeNAS, but ZFS' lack of granular expansion options (ability to add 1 drive at a time to an existing raid 6) makes it a non-option. And going raid 10 for a (mostly) movie repository/share is a waste of drive bays to me.
Other than trying to figure out Xpenology's DSM 6.0, does anyone have any other options that they can think of to do shares on software (or hardware) raid (5 and 6), with the option to expand the raid sets by 1 drive at a time when needed, and if possible run virtual machines (50-75% Windows VMs usually)?
