@nitrobass
well, right now i have nothing but a dream and an unpurchased newegg shopping cart
i have been all over the place planning this build the past couple weeks. zfs recently cropped up into my mind this week and i like what i see. now i am figuring out the best way to achieve it. then i'll decide if its worth it over other architectures.
my current hardware plan is generally an x9scm-F, E3-1230, 16GB ECC, 1 IBM M1015, etc...
last week, the system architecture was along these lines:
Host: Win2008R2 with Hyper-V
VM1: WHS2011
other VMs to serve basic use cases, remote desktop for browsing, a LAMP stack, OS testing, maybe a local MSSQL/IIS server (i.e. nothing significant)
i was going to Raid1 160GB drives on the onboard controller for the host, and maybe a 1TB Raid1 for VM vhds also on the onboard controller
6 hitachi 5k3000 on the M1015 in three Raid1 arrays, each passed to the WHS2011 VM for storage.
i had gotten past caring about having a large storage pool and having to segregate my media into 2TB chunks. I had also came to terms years ago that my WHS would have only 50% of its raw storage available (Raid1 having no disadvantages over DE in this regard). after plenty of reading, this week ZFS became a contender. I can increase the usable to raw disk space ratio, can utilize 2 parity drives without buying a $X00 raid 6 controller, and regain the advantages and conveniences of a large single pool. not to mention, the supported ability to run consumer drives in the zfs pools instead of running the well-trusted 5k3000 on a raid controller.
so, going down the ZFS road, I still want to keep WHS2011 around for the application layer it provides. My understanding from STH front page articles and post at [H] that ZFS is widely supported on BSD/Solaris variants and that BSD/Solaris and its variants don't play well with hyper-v (or the other way around). That is when i mentally switched over to thinking about ESXi for this setup.
I was stuck on iSCSI because i didn't think windows could mount NFS shares for some reason. that was my only reason for talking about iSCSI a couple posts ago.
i'm sure there's plenty i've left out and even more that'll confuse the hell out of people that know what they are doing. I can provide whatever else I can to clear anything up on what it is I am talking about. I was going to start a thread in the DIY storage server forum with the build specs, but this thread has sorta hijacked that for the time being
here are some of the [H] threads that inspired this new direction:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1579961,
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1037031715
i want to refine the hardware/virtual architecture before I buy equipment. that seems the smart approach.