Home Environment Overhaul Ideas

[STANirvanaIND]

Hey Everyone, this is going to be a mildly long-winded post, but the short and sweet is it’s time for a major overhaul of my home environment. My environment is mostly (re: almost entirely) built from parts I’ve gotten from work, over the years through either hardware retirements or (recently) the company shutting down. My current setup was built to be power efficient, while still having the horse-power to run what I need (*Plex*, game servers, etc.), but I’ve run out of space yet again and have no more capacity to add additional storage without additional hardware. My current setup is as follows (generic names used):

Utilized
HOST01 – Lenovo P330 Tiny w/ 4 Port NetXtreme NIC

-OS: ESXI 7​

-CPU: i7 9700T​

-Memory: 32 GB​

-PCI: NetXtreme 4 Port NIC (1GB)​

-Storage: 2x 500GB NVMe​

-VMs​

-VM1: Firewall​

-VM2: Security​

-VM3: Linux General Purpose​

-VM4: Windows General Purpose​

Network

-1x Netgear GS110TP​

Baremetal01 – Custom Build (All drives standalone)

-CPU: Intel i7 8700​

-Mobo: Asrock B365 Pro4​

-Memory: 32GB (2x 16GB)​

-PCIe: LSI SAS 9280-8e, LSI SAS2 2008 Falcon​

-Storage: 2x 500GB NVMe, 4x 8TB WD Red, 8x 6TB WD Red​

-PSU: CX750M​

-OS: Windows​

DAS – ThinkServer SA120

-12 Bays, 4TB WD REDs, ~36.3TB Usable​

Unutilized
Datto Siris 4 Enterprise

-CPU: 2x Intel Xeon Silver 4214​

-Mobo: Gigabyte MD71-HB0​

-Memory: 64 GB DDR4 ECC​

-NICs: 2x 10GbE, 2x 1GbE, 1x MGMT​

-Storage: 6x 6TB, 2x 2.5” bays, 2x NVMe slot​

-PSU: 2x 800W​

HP Aruba 2930M
Dell PowerEdge R330
Dell PowerEdge R320
Misc Hardware (10GB cards, Additional P330’s, >Intel Gen 7 desktops, Quadro RTX 4000(s), 6TB WD reds, etc.)


Initially I was hoping to get one of the old Synology NASes from work which would’ve handled storage requirements for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out so now I’m looking at what I can do with what I have. My initial thought is to rip out the Mobo from the current baremetal and put something in more low power to convert it to, functionally, just a NAS (running something like TrueNAS), then use the Sirus as the new replacement server, populating the remaining front bays and doing a direct connect fiber (10GB) to the NAS. Of course this is going to be terribly power inefficient, so I was hoping someone may have some better ideas/different. Virtualization-wise I’d like to keep the Siris baremetal as the P330 has more than enough spare resources but I’m open any changes at the end of the day.

 

[zachj]

Why do you need anything other than the datto box? It alone is more horsepower than almost anyone needs.

if you need storage just swap the motherboard from the datto server into something with all the drive bays you want—it’s just an E-ATX board. If you really want to go testicles to the wall a case from 45 drives should last you a good long time.

the only thing the datto box doesn’t solve for you is plex transcoding but that can be solved with almost any nvidia gpu.

 

[STANirvanaIND]

Why do you need anything other than the datto box? It alone is more horsepower than almost anyone needs.

if you need storage just swap the motherboard from the datto server into something with all the drive bays you want—it’s just an E-ATX board. If you really want to go testicles to the wall a case from 45 drives should last you a good long time.

the only thing the datto box doesn’t solve for you is plex transcoding but that can be solved with almost any nvidia gpu.

Haha funny you say that. Currently my biggest contender (outside of what I said above) is picking up a Supermicro SAS3 36 Bay chasis (847BE1C-R1K28LPB) and transplanting the Datto board into it. Of course that requires buying the chasis, so I was curious if anyone had any other ideas before I pull the trigger.

 

[zachj]

Your board likely supports cascade lake xeons and optane pmem; if you need more compute—and I don’t think you do—your existing board’s got legs.

it’s now technically inferior by 3 generations but it’s still a ton of machine.

The biggest drawback to the 3647 xeons is lack of pcie lanes and I don’t think your use case needs more than you have; mechanical drives are slow as global warming so sas expanders can get you all the space you want.

Living the “all in one box” life as I do right now I can say I do often wish I had storage separate from compute so reboots are less painful. I could certainly see an argument for keeping your storage separate, but in that case I’d throw one of your existing i7s at storage since spinning rust hardly needs robust cpu. And I’d keep the datto box as compute.