Just bought a 2nd server and need some advice.

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Falloutboy

Active Member
Oct 23, 2011
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I have just bought a 2nd Supermicro H12-SSL-i so now I will have 2, 1 will be a backup at another location for the other.

The primary is the H12-SSL-i with an Epyc 7c13 64/128 and has 512G ram and a 10Gb NIC, I will probably add a meaty video card for VMs ( just haven't decided what ) I could dedicate a 1080Ti or a 4080 or something else to the job.

The secondary is the same board with and a 7313P with 256G of ram, it doesn't need near as much of everything as it will be at a remote locale and just be used for backups via the internet.

They will both have a Samsung 980 2TB each as primary boot and a Samsung PM9A3 data center drive which I'm not sure if I should use for cache and/or intent log for TrueNas running ZFS - best practice guide says to dedicate the drive to one thing is it safe to do other than best practice?

Both machines will have a 9361-8I With BBU and Cache with a 24 way SAS3 Expander and host 15 JBOD drives @ 10TB each in a ZFS Z2 Raid setup with two parities totaling 130TB and will have 2 spare drives ( if that can be done, I haven't yet read up on what ZFS can and can't do )

Now the things about hardware I don't know that I am hoping someone can tell me...

With the PM9A3 is there any speed reduction AND is it indeed possible for that drive to act as a ZFS cache if it is on the motherboard as opposed to on a controller with the drives?

If It does have to be on the same controller as the drives would a 9600-24i Tri Mode controller cut the mustard?

Thanks all and yes I am aware that the 7c13 is hella overkill but I got a good deal.
 
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ca3y6

Active Member
Apr 3, 2021
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My first reaction is to be careful with putting TrueNas on a WAN. I did that with a synology and would only sleep at night because I was running a script on it every 10 minutes which checked for change a text file in the cloud containing an IP whitelist and would update the firewall of the synology so that it refuses any other connection on all ports. But because synology resets the firewall on every reboot, the server was still exposed for up to 10 min on reboots.
 
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mattventura

Well-Known Member
Nov 9, 2022
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Falloutboy said:
Both machines will have a 9361-8I With BBU and Cache with a 24 way SAS3 Expander and host 15 JBOD drives @ 10TB each in a ZFS Z2 Raid setup with two parities totaling 130TB and will have 2 spare drives ( if that can be done, I haven't yet read up on what ZFS can and can't do )
Click to expand...
Don't do that. You want a pure HBA for ZFS, not a hardware RAID card. Even putting it in JBOD might hide certain things from the OS.

Tri-mode isn't great. I would stay away from it. The NVMe doesn't need to be on the same controller.
 
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Falloutboy

Active Member
Oct 23, 2011
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mattventura said:
Don't do that. You want a pure HBA for ZFS, not a hardware RAID card. Even putting it in JBOD might hide certain things from the OS.

Tri-mode isn't great. I would stay away from it. The NVMe doesn't need to be on the same controller.
Click to expand...
Do you have a recommendation for the HBAs and are SAS Expanders allowable tin this instance?

I also have 2 x Supermicro AOC-S3008L-L8E which AFAIK are plain HBAs with nothing but IT Mode, hopefully they will work with HP SAS Expanders if not I might have to get a couple of 9305-24is.
 
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