Hello,
I am doing some suggestion gathering to come up with a plan for my next round of home network upgrades. In my current setup I have:
1x QNAP TS-1679u-rp in raid 6 with a hot spare. Most of the drives are 4tb with 2 8tb to replace failed drives. This is my primary storage server
1x Ryzen 2700x with 32gb ram, a few spinning rust and 3 NVME. This is one of my ESXI servers, which is "working" but is not the way I would like it due to lack of support for consumer hardware. I have most of my VMs on this machine it includes a Plex Media Server, Docker server, domain controller, backup server and download server.
1x Some old hp desktop with 24gb ram running ESXI for few VMs that are not critical to my network.
4x raspberrypi running various things.
Several Switches, access points and personal machines that will not be part of the change other than maybe adding in some 10g support.
My goal is do some consolidation and cut down on power usage, expand functionality and maybe simplify things a bit.
One of the thoughts I have had has been to pickup an AMD Epyc system but I think that the slower core speed could be a little bit of an issue if I start re-encoding some of my media. So a threadripper up in the 16-24 core is most likely what I would get.
I have also been thinking about turning the QNAP into an offline backup as I am not exactly happy with it and maybe making my storage server and the hypervisor the same machine. I have messed around with UNRAID in the past mostly as a hypervisor which I did not like but I liked the simplicity of mixing and matching drives for storage so I can easily expand the pool without needing to replace all my drives. So with this I am not sure the correct path both for both hardware and software. If I merge the hypervisor and storage into one box should I do something like a 24 bay chassis pick up an HBA or 2 and connect everything internally having 8bays available to the hypervisor and the other 16 for the storage server, or do I go smaller on the chassis keep internal storage for the hypervisor and pickup a used diskshelf for the storage server or is there a compelling enough reason to keep the 2 server separate?
I know some of my questions lean more software related than hardware so I might post over in in the software section once I have a better idea of hardware. Any suggestions or even just a "here is what I did" are greatly appreciated. I would also like to keep this from getting crazy expensive.
Thanks in advance
I am doing some suggestion gathering to come up with a plan for my next round of home network upgrades. In my current setup I have:
1x QNAP TS-1679u-rp in raid 6 with a hot spare. Most of the drives are 4tb with 2 8tb to replace failed drives. This is my primary storage server
1x Ryzen 2700x with 32gb ram, a few spinning rust and 3 NVME. This is one of my ESXI servers, which is "working" but is not the way I would like it due to lack of support for consumer hardware. I have most of my VMs on this machine it includes a Plex Media Server, Docker server, domain controller, backup server and download server.
1x Some old hp desktop with 24gb ram running ESXI for few VMs that are not critical to my network.
4x raspberrypi running various things.
Several Switches, access points and personal machines that will not be part of the change other than maybe adding in some 10g support.
My goal is do some consolidation and cut down on power usage, expand functionality and maybe simplify things a bit.
One of the thoughts I have had has been to pickup an AMD Epyc system but I think that the slower core speed could be a little bit of an issue if I start re-encoding some of my media. So a threadripper up in the 16-24 core is most likely what I would get.
I have also been thinking about turning the QNAP into an offline backup as I am not exactly happy with it and maybe making my storage server and the hypervisor the same machine. I have messed around with UNRAID in the past mostly as a hypervisor which I did not like but I liked the simplicity of mixing and matching drives for storage so I can easily expand the pool without needing to replace all my drives. So with this I am not sure the correct path both for both hardware and software. If I merge the hypervisor and storage into one box should I do something like a 24 bay chassis pick up an HBA or 2 and connect everything internally having 8bays available to the hypervisor and the other 16 for the storage server, or do I go smaller on the chassis keep internal storage for the hypervisor and pickup a used diskshelf for the storage server or is there a compelling enough reason to keep the 2 server separate?
I know some of my questions lean more software related than hardware so I might post over in in the software section once I have a better idea of hardware. Any suggestions or even just a "here is what I did" are greatly appreciated. I would also like to keep this from getting crazy expensive.
Thanks in advance