Hi everyone
I am currently rocking a frankenserver hyperconverged solution I build from an old Reo virtual tape library chassis. I have dual Xeon CPUs and 256 GB RAM.
I PCI passthrough the HBA to a TrueNAS VM which in turn provides NSF storage to its host machine. I have about a good 100GB of memory used (64 of which go to TrueNAS).
I have 10 2TB spinning rust disks in there split into two 5 disk RAIDz1 vdevs.
Additionally I have a bifurcation card providing four gumsticks to the TrueNAS as well. The ESXi Datastores for this host come from there.
I have built this with consumer grade tower coolers on the CPUs (hence the 4U chassis) because it's in a room with an open door that goes right into my living room. Silent operation is king as well as power consumption.
The machine as well as two mikrotik switches and a Ubiquiti AP are behind a UPS and that UPS according to my watt meter sips less than 200W. I would like it to stay that way.
this ran for several years on hardware that's probably been in service noticably more than five years already. So why am I considering an upgrade? Yesterday I had a Pink Screen of Death. It couldn't communicate with a CPU it said.
So I want to not be caught like a deer in headlights if and when this goes to a better place.
I am gravitating toward the Beelink ME Mini for Storage. I thought I could perhaps attach NVMe to SATA adapters to move my spinning rust to a beelink. It should still have enough slots left to drive my remaining four NVMes the VMs live on. At a later date, I could acquire a second Beelinik ME Mini, put in six 4TB Gumsticks in RAIDz1 (because with NVMe, even at one lane only, resilvering should be quick enough to not need RAIDz2) and build a redundant storage solution. Granted, I've only had ChatGPT tell me that TrueNAS can do redundant iSCSI storage... I have no experience with that yet.
So tl;dr: I'd like youropinions on the above idea but MUCH MORE: What do I use for compute? My current setup has dual E5-2695 and it uses about 2GHz of57GHz available... Would a N150 be enough?The ME Mini just doesn't have the Memory capacity... I need at least 22GB per host, otherwise I lose redundancy. But the SER machines seem to have only Gigabit Ethernet.
So please help me find a machine that gives me 12+ Threads, 32+GB RAM, VERY low power consumption (15 to 25W TDP?) unless it's really needed, preferably 10GBit Ethernet but I guess I could survive with five?
I welcome any thoughts on the matter.
I have no high performance applications going here. The largest VM is TrueNAS but that would get its own hardware. I have an emby on there and I wonder about hardware encoding. I don't know how well that works with AMD APUs. I also don't know whether CPU encoding of something newer than my Xeons would be enough for the two streams I use in parallel in a worst case scenario.
I am currently rocking a frankenserver hyperconverged solution I build from an old Reo virtual tape library chassis. I have dual Xeon CPUs and 256 GB RAM.
I PCI passthrough the HBA to a TrueNAS VM which in turn provides NSF storage to its host machine. I have about a good 100GB of memory used (64 of which go to TrueNAS).
I have 10 2TB spinning rust disks in there split into two 5 disk RAIDz1 vdevs.
Additionally I have a bifurcation card providing four gumsticks to the TrueNAS as well. The ESXi Datastores for this host come from there.
I have built this with consumer grade tower coolers on the CPUs (hence the 4U chassis) because it's in a room with an open door that goes right into my living room. Silent operation is king as well as power consumption.
The machine as well as two mikrotik switches and a Ubiquiti AP are behind a UPS and that UPS according to my watt meter sips less than 200W. I would like it to stay that way.
this ran for several years on hardware that's probably been in service noticably more than five years already. So why am I considering an upgrade? Yesterday I had a Pink Screen of Death. It couldn't communicate with a CPU it said.
So I want to not be caught like a deer in headlights if and when this goes to a better place.
I am gravitating toward the Beelink ME Mini for Storage. I thought I could perhaps attach NVMe to SATA adapters to move my spinning rust to a beelink. It should still have enough slots left to drive my remaining four NVMes the VMs live on. At a later date, I could acquire a second Beelinik ME Mini, put in six 4TB Gumsticks in RAIDz1 (because with NVMe, even at one lane only, resilvering should be quick enough to not need RAIDz2) and build a redundant storage solution. Granted, I've only had ChatGPT tell me that TrueNAS can do redundant iSCSI storage... I have no experience with that yet.
So tl;dr: I'd like youropinions on the above idea but MUCH MORE: What do I use for compute? My current setup has dual E5-2695 and it uses about 2GHz of57GHz available... Would a N150 be enough?The ME Mini just doesn't have the Memory capacity... I need at least 22GB per host, otherwise I lose redundancy. But the SER machines seem to have only Gigabit Ethernet.
So please help me find a machine that gives me 12+ Threads, 32+GB RAM, VERY low power consumption (15 to 25W TDP?) unless it's really needed, preferably 10GBit Ethernet but I guess I could survive with five?
I welcome any thoughts on the matter.
I have no high performance applications going here. The largest VM is TrueNAS but that would get its own hardware. I have an emby on there and I wonder about hardware encoding. I don't know how well that works with AMD APUs. I also don't know whether CPU encoding of something newer than my Xeons would be enough for the two streams I use in parallel in a worst case scenario.
