Hey guys,
I'm relatively new here and have been reading through the forums to try to learn about FreeNAS and how to set it up on my ESXi server. There are lots of good tutorials here and I feel like I have learned enough to get started but, before I do I was hoping to get a quick sanity check on my hardware. Any tips/advice will be most appreciated.
Several years ago, I wanted a home lab that I could use to run some experiments for work. I bought the following:
Chasis: SC721TQ-250B (SC721TQ-250B | Mini-tower | Chassis | Products | Super Micro Computer, Inc.)
Mainboard: Supermicro x10sdv-tln4f (Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Xeon® Boards | X10SDV-TLN4F)
Processor: Intel® Xeon® processor D-1541
Memory: 128GB
Storage Drives: 4 - 3TB WD RED NAS drives
SSD: 1 Samsung EVO 850 512GB
This worked great for setting up VMs to experiment with (was evaluating various Hadoop distros) though to be honest I never used it as much as I hoped (I found it easier to spin up temporary VMs on my Mac with Vagrant and I never found much of a need to running VMs for long periods of time which may have made me use my ESXi server more). So now, I have decided that I want to repurpose this as a FreeNAS server but I want to run it on a VM in ESXi so that I can still run other VMs on the same server if I find a need to.
My main question is, does this hardware setup make sense or are there some problems with it?
I don't currently have all that much data to store (less than 1 TB so the space/# of disks doesn't seem to be a problem for my needs). I think I'll primarily use this for backups of the various machines on my network and maybe run Plex.
The main thing that I think may be wrong is that from what I read, it seems that I may need to buy an HBA so that the disks can be passed directly to the FreeNAS VM so that ZFS will work correctly. (Yes, You Can Virtualize FreeNAS - FreeNAS - Open Source Storage Operating System). Well, it sounds like it is possible to do it without the HBA but, it doesn't sound like it's recommended. I'd never even heard of an HBA before so I'm not terribly familiar with them...I only know the limited amount I've read in the past few days. Ideally, I'd be able to plug it in to the one PCI-E port on the mainboard and then connect all the drives to it internally though I worry about the way the case is setup with a HD backplane. Thoughts?
Other than that is there anything else I need to worry about?
I'm relatively new here and have been reading through the forums to try to learn about FreeNAS and how to set it up on my ESXi server. There are lots of good tutorials here and I feel like I have learned enough to get started but, before I do I was hoping to get a quick sanity check on my hardware. Any tips/advice will be most appreciated.
Several years ago, I wanted a home lab that I could use to run some experiments for work. I bought the following:
Chasis: SC721TQ-250B (SC721TQ-250B | Mini-tower | Chassis | Products | Super Micro Computer, Inc.)
Mainboard: Supermicro x10sdv-tln4f (Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Xeon® Boards | X10SDV-TLN4F)
Processor: Intel® Xeon® processor D-1541
Memory: 128GB
Storage Drives: 4 - 3TB WD RED NAS drives
SSD: 1 Samsung EVO 850 512GB
This worked great for setting up VMs to experiment with (was evaluating various Hadoop distros) though to be honest I never used it as much as I hoped (I found it easier to spin up temporary VMs on my Mac with Vagrant and I never found much of a need to running VMs for long periods of time which may have made me use my ESXi server more). So now, I have decided that I want to repurpose this as a FreeNAS server but I want to run it on a VM in ESXi so that I can still run other VMs on the same server if I find a need to.
My main question is, does this hardware setup make sense or are there some problems with it?
I don't currently have all that much data to store (less than 1 TB so the space/# of disks doesn't seem to be a problem for my needs). I think I'll primarily use this for backups of the various machines on my network and maybe run Plex.
The main thing that I think may be wrong is that from what I read, it seems that I may need to buy an HBA so that the disks can be passed directly to the FreeNAS VM so that ZFS will work correctly. (Yes, You Can Virtualize FreeNAS - FreeNAS - Open Source Storage Operating System). Well, it sounds like it is possible to do it without the HBA but, it doesn't sound like it's recommended. I'd never even heard of an HBA before so I'm not terribly familiar with them...I only know the limited amount I've read in the past few days. Ideally, I'd be able to plug it in to the one PCI-E port on the mainboard and then connect all the drives to it internally though I worry about the way the case is setup with a HD backplane. Thoughts?
Other than that is there anything else I need to worry about?