Hello,
I’ve been running my home lab as it stands for a couple of years now. The hardware is starting to get dated and I would really like to reduce my power usage and also increase some redundancy.
Currently I have an R210 II with a Xeon e3-1220, a single cheap SSD and 8GB of RAM running pfSense as my main router/firewall.
An R710 with dual Xeon L5640’s and 96GB of RAM with a raid 5 array of spinning disks. This is running my sole ESXi node with 10-15 VMs. ESXi is installed on a flash drive on the internal USB.
A second R710 with dual Xeon L5640’s and 108 GB of RAM and a mirrored cheap SSD array running FreeNAS. It is connected to a 45 bay SuperMicro JBOD enclosure with ~12 spinning disks.
These are the heavy power usage/noise/heat generating devices. A couple of smaller IoT hubs and a switch and the rack has a total usage of 6-8amps/800-1000 watts. I’ve currently eliminated the need for the SuperMicro JBOD by utilizing a Gsuite business account for the majority of my storage needs.
I’m looking to setup a 3 node VSAN cluster. I’m not sure how feasible it is to run two virtualized pfSense instances in CARP or if I should do 1 VM on the Cluster and a separate physical pfSense node. I was thinking I could also pass through an HBA on one of the nodes to have a 5-6 RaidZ2 array for my data I would like to have a local copy of with a backup on the Gsuite drive.
One of the things I’m struggling with is the hardware to reduce my power usage and heat/noise generation. I initially was thinking of using Xeon e-2136g’s but anything from that series seems hard to come by. I would like have console ability so I believe that restricts me to a super micro board unless I go with another enterprise chassis but that might make it harder to reduce the power/heat/noise. I’m assuming I would need a 2–4U enclosure to keep noise to a minimum. I’m thinking roughly $1,000 per node cheaper would obviously be better but DDR4 gets expensive. Ability to add 10Gb SFP+ NICs is required. What CPU generation and chassis would be recommended?
My other question is, is it possible to setup one node with an SSD data store and migrate my existing VMs from the R710 to that, then add the other nodes after a couple of months with their own SSD data store and convert it into VSAN without losing the data store or would I need to migrate all my VMs to an external data store create the VSAN data store and migrate back? Is this a sound idea or do I need to setup all three nodes at once?
Thank you for any help that can be provided.
I’ve been running my home lab as it stands for a couple of years now. The hardware is starting to get dated and I would really like to reduce my power usage and also increase some redundancy.
Currently I have an R210 II with a Xeon e3-1220, a single cheap SSD and 8GB of RAM running pfSense as my main router/firewall.
An R710 with dual Xeon L5640’s and 96GB of RAM with a raid 5 array of spinning disks. This is running my sole ESXi node with 10-15 VMs. ESXi is installed on a flash drive on the internal USB.
A second R710 with dual Xeon L5640’s and 108 GB of RAM and a mirrored cheap SSD array running FreeNAS. It is connected to a 45 bay SuperMicro JBOD enclosure with ~12 spinning disks.
These are the heavy power usage/noise/heat generating devices. A couple of smaller IoT hubs and a switch and the rack has a total usage of 6-8amps/800-1000 watts. I’ve currently eliminated the need for the SuperMicro JBOD by utilizing a Gsuite business account for the majority of my storage needs.
I’m looking to setup a 3 node VSAN cluster. I’m not sure how feasible it is to run two virtualized pfSense instances in CARP or if I should do 1 VM on the Cluster and a separate physical pfSense node. I was thinking I could also pass through an HBA on one of the nodes to have a 5-6 RaidZ2 array for my data I would like to have a local copy of with a backup on the Gsuite drive.
One of the things I’m struggling with is the hardware to reduce my power usage and heat/noise generation. I initially was thinking of using Xeon e-2136g’s but anything from that series seems hard to come by. I would like have console ability so I believe that restricts me to a super micro board unless I go with another enterprise chassis but that might make it harder to reduce the power/heat/noise. I’m assuming I would need a 2–4U enclosure to keep noise to a minimum. I’m thinking roughly $1,000 per node cheaper would obviously be better but DDR4 gets expensive. Ability to add 10Gb SFP+ NICs is required. What CPU generation and chassis would be recommended?
My other question is, is it possible to setup one node with an SSD data store and migrate my existing VMs from the R710 to that, then add the other nodes after a couple of months with their own SSD data store and convert it into VSAN without losing the data store or would I need to migrate all my VMs to an external data store create the VSAN data store and migrate back? Is this a sound idea or do I need to setup all three nodes at once?
Thank you for any help that can be provided.