Background: This is a comprehensive build log/history of almost everything computer related I can think of, so it may be a little long. This is the first time I’ve documented the history of my entire system (for myself even), so hopefully it’s relatively on topic. The posts are also split since there’s a maximum of 30 images per post.
I'm a software developer, and all of this is purely as a hobby. I’m a year out of college now, but most of the equipment I have was bought, and bought used, while I was still in college, so I tried to get the best deals I could on essentially only one major hardware purchase a year. In 2012, I caught the virtualization bug and consolidated every computer function except my desktop and laptop on ESXi. 4 years later and now my desktop is virtualized too. Virtualization has been an amazing tool for someone like me. Virtualization allowed me to experiment and learn a huge amount with just a small set of hardware. Even today, I sometimes think about how amazing it is that a single physical computer could be running my desktop, television, NAS, and more, all at the same time!
I have 3 ESXi hosts currently, and they’re listed below in the order they came online.
Build’s Name: Larken
Operating System/ Storage Platform: VMware ESXi 6.0U2
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1245v3
Motherboard: Supermicro X10SAT
Chassis: Supermicro SC846TQ
TV VM Datastore: 1x 128GB Samsung 850 EVO
TV Scratch + SnapRAID: 1x 160GB WD VelociRaptor, 1x 5TB Toshiba (from the shucking deal here), 3x 4TB WD Red, 2x 3TB WD Red, 2x 3TB WD Green
NAS Scratch + Storage Spaces: 1x 320GB WD Blue, 4x 4TB White Label (WD RE)
RAM: 32GB (4x 8GB) Crucial Unbuffered ECC 1600Mhz DDR3
Add-in Cards: 2x IBM M1015 (flashed to LSI/Avago/Broadcom 9211), Mellanox ConnectX-2 EN, Intel RES2SV240 SAS expander
Power Supply: 1x Supermicro PWS‑920P‑1R, Power at Idle: ~200W
Other Bits: Online in 2013
Usage Profile: Television and NAS storage, television operations
Other information: A little history: I have a love of TV that my girlfriend says borders on the obsessive. But oddly, it’s not necessarily with the TV shows themselves, but with the systems and technologies that are used to watch TV. Windows Media Center is a DVR application that Microsoft developed during the 2000’s. Although abandoned by Microsoft after the release of Windows 7, even today it is still the best platform (IMO) to watch and record television on a PC, and the only option to watch and record television on a PC if you watch certain channels (usually HBO/Showtime/etc) on certain cable providers. Microsoft put a lot of time, effort, and money into WMC and, while some of that made it into the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, it’s disappointing to see WMC abandoned. The largest benefits of running WMC to me (compared to a Tivo for example) are automatic commercial skipping, and vastly increased storage capacity, which brings me to:
I’m a digital hoarder, and uncompressed MPEG2 recordings are 5-8GB per hour, depending on the channel. As a result, I had to buy more and more hard drives and was soon out of drive slots in the random desktop case I was using as a NAS at the time. This server was meant to be the solution to the storage shortage. This server is also the only one that I bought a few components at retail (as opposed to eBay/forum members). The X10SAT motherboard and E3-1245v3 were purchased new, because the Haswell E3 platform was relatively new in 2013. The X10SAT is technically a workstation motherboard, but it was the only one Supermicro had at the time with all PCIe slots (all of their Haswell E3 server boards back then had at least 1 PCI slot which would have been a complete waste for me). I do sometimes wish it had IPMI/BMC, but other than that, I’ve encountered no issues running on a workstation board. I found the Supermicro SC846TQ case from TAMS, which has popped up around here a few times. I probably could have bought used parts for an older platform, but I had a little extra money that summer. Larken runs 3 VMs normally:
The TV VM runs on Windows 7 since WMC runs best on 7. WMC was not meant to be run in a VM. However, Microsoft designed devices called “WMC Extenders”, which are much like Tivo Mini’s in that they “extend” the WMC session across ethernet to wherever your TV is (it uses a special form of RDP even). The WMC VM can then stream live and recorded television to these Extender boxes, completely bypassing the need to passthrough a GPU (and possibly place a noisy server in the living room). The tuners are network based, also bypassing the need to passthrough a USB or PCIe tuner. What is passed through to the TV VM is an M1015 connected to an Intel RES2SV240 SAS expander, and one of the onboard NICs. Storage runs on a combination of SnapRAID + DrivePool, which works well since the media files are generally only added and don’t change. DrivePool allows me to spread TV files across several hard drives, but present one unified hard drive/folder to WMC to show all Recorded TV items in one view (currently ~3400 episodes recorded). I used to run FlexRAID RAID-F for a combination of drive pooling and parity, but there were unexplained error messages and the software just felt rickety. SnapRAID + DrivePool feels much more robust and solid. I also have a Windows 10 VM that runs Emby, which serves ripped blurays and such to an Nvidia Shield (running Kodi), and also any computer/mobile device.
The NAS VM runs Windows Server 2012 R2 with the other M1015 passed through. I’ve got 4x 4TB White Label (WD RE) drives in 2 separate mirrored Storage Spaces pools (2x 2x 4TB in Storage Spaces mirrors). One pool is for general file storage, and the other pool is for backups. I used to run another FlexRAID product, tRAID, instead of Storage Spaces, and while it has successfully recovered files in the past, yet again, there would be unexplained error messages and it didn’t feel solid.
The NAS VM runs Veeam Backup and Replication every month, which backs up the entire VM environment. The Veeam backups are then uploaded to CrashPlan, although lately, so much data is changing every month that the backups don’t finish uploading before it’s time to make the next set of backups (I only have 4mb upload on Charter). One cool thing about the SC846TQ case is that I can pass some drive slots to the TV VM, and others to the NAS VM (as opposed to an expander backplane). So I’ve got 2 completely separate storage systems, running different software, for completely different purposes, all running in the same case and computer!
This server also was also my “test” bench for various VMs and hardware (until I got Luna below), and ran my “work” computer for around a year using a Quadro 2000 and HP zero client. With a Quadro 2000, 2x IBM M1015, and a Mellanox ConnectX-2, I was out of PCIe slots that could physically fit all the cards (there’s 3x x16 and 3x x4 slots, and all the cards are x8 except for the Quadro 2000). I bought a StarTech adapter PCI Express X1 to X16 Low Profile Slot Extension Adapter that could make an x16 low profile card fit into a x1 full height slot, and placed one of the M1015’s on there. I didn’t notice any performance issues, probably because I wasn’t doing anything too disk intensive, and the Quadro 2000 is retired now freeing up the slot for the M1015 again.
Photos:
SC846:
Supermicro X10SAT:
X10SAT installed:
Intel SAS expander mounted "creatively" to the side:
I'm a software developer, and all of this is purely as a hobby. I’m a year out of college now, but most of the equipment I have was bought, and bought used, while I was still in college, so I tried to get the best deals I could on essentially only one major hardware purchase a year. In 2012, I caught the virtualization bug and consolidated every computer function except my desktop and laptop on ESXi. 4 years later and now my desktop is virtualized too. Virtualization has been an amazing tool for someone like me. Virtualization allowed me to experiment and learn a huge amount with just a small set of hardware. Even today, I sometimes think about how amazing it is that a single physical computer could be running my desktop, television, NAS, and more, all at the same time!
I have 3 ESXi hosts currently, and they’re listed below in the order they came online.
Build’s Name: Larken
Operating System/ Storage Platform: VMware ESXi 6.0U2
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1245v3
Motherboard: Supermicro X10SAT
Chassis: Supermicro SC846TQ
TV VM Datastore: 1x 128GB Samsung 850 EVO
TV Scratch + SnapRAID: 1x 160GB WD VelociRaptor, 1x 5TB Toshiba (from the shucking deal here), 3x 4TB WD Red, 2x 3TB WD Red, 2x 3TB WD Green
NAS Scratch + Storage Spaces: 1x 320GB WD Blue, 4x 4TB White Label (WD RE)
RAM: 32GB (4x 8GB) Crucial Unbuffered ECC 1600Mhz DDR3
Add-in Cards: 2x IBM M1015 (flashed to LSI/Avago/Broadcom 9211), Mellanox ConnectX-2 EN, Intel RES2SV240 SAS expander
Power Supply: 1x Supermicro PWS‑920P‑1R, Power at Idle: ~200W
Other Bits: Online in 2013
Usage Profile: Television and NAS storage, television operations
Other information: A little history: I have a love of TV that my girlfriend says borders on the obsessive. But oddly, it’s not necessarily with the TV shows themselves, but with the systems and technologies that are used to watch TV. Windows Media Center is a DVR application that Microsoft developed during the 2000’s. Although abandoned by Microsoft after the release of Windows 7, even today it is still the best platform (IMO) to watch and record television on a PC, and the only option to watch and record television on a PC if you watch certain channels (usually HBO/Showtime/etc) on certain cable providers. Microsoft put a lot of time, effort, and money into WMC and, while some of that made it into the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, it’s disappointing to see WMC abandoned. The largest benefits of running WMC to me (compared to a Tivo for example) are automatic commercial skipping, and vastly increased storage capacity, which brings me to:
I’m a digital hoarder, and uncompressed MPEG2 recordings are 5-8GB per hour, depending on the channel. As a result, I had to buy more and more hard drives and was soon out of drive slots in the random desktop case I was using as a NAS at the time. This server was meant to be the solution to the storage shortage. This server is also the only one that I bought a few components at retail (as opposed to eBay/forum members). The X10SAT motherboard and E3-1245v3 were purchased new, because the Haswell E3 platform was relatively new in 2013. The X10SAT is technically a workstation motherboard, but it was the only one Supermicro had at the time with all PCIe slots (all of their Haswell E3 server boards back then had at least 1 PCI slot which would have been a complete waste for me). I do sometimes wish it had IPMI/BMC, but other than that, I’ve encountered no issues running on a workstation board. I found the Supermicro SC846TQ case from TAMS, which has popped up around here a few times. I probably could have bought used parts for an older platform, but I had a little extra money that summer. Larken runs 3 VMs normally:
The TV VM runs on Windows 7 since WMC runs best on 7. WMC was not meant to be run in a VM. However, Microsoft designed devices called “WMC Extenders”, which are much like Tivo Mini’s in that they “extend” the WMC session across ethernet to wherever your TV is (it uses a special form of RDP even). The WMC VM can then stream live and recorded television to these Extender boxes, completely bypassing the need to passthrough a GPU (and possibly place a noisy server in the living room). The tuners are network based, also bypassing the need to passthrough a USB or PCIe tuner. What is passed through to the TV VM is an M1015 connected to an Intel RES2SV240 SAS expander, and one of the onboard NICs. Storage runs on a combination of SnapRAID + DrivePool, which works well since the media files are generally only added and don’t change. DrivePool allows me to spread TV files across several hard drives, but present one unified hard drive/folder to WMC to show all Recorded TV items in one view (currently ~3400 episodes recorded). I used to run FlexRAID RAID-F for a combination of drive pooling and parity, but there were unexplained error messages and the software just felt rickety. SnapRAID + DrivePool feels much more robust and solid. I also have a Windows 10 VM that runs Emby, which serves ripped blurays and such to an Nvidia Shield (running Kodi), and also any computer/mobile device.
The NAS VM runs Windows Server 2012 R2 with the other M1015 passed through. I’ve got 4x 4TB White Label (WD RE) drives in 2 separate mirrored Storage Spaces pools (2x 2x 4TB in Storage Spaces mirrors). One pool is for general file storage, and the other pool is for backups. I used to run another FlexRAID product, tRAID, instead of Storage Spaces, and while it has successfully recovered files in the past, yet again, there would be unexplained error messages and it didn’t feel solid.
The NAS VM runs Veeam Backup and Replication every month, which backs up the entire VM environment. The Veeam backups are then uploaded to CrashPlan, although lately, so much data is changing every month that the backups don’t finish uploading before it’s time to make the next set of backups (I only have 4mb upload on Charter). One cool thing about the SC846TQ case is that I can pass some drive slots to the TV VM, and others to the NAS VM (as opposed to an expander backplane). So I’ve got 2 completely separate storage systems, running different software, for completely different purposes, all running in the same case and computer!
This server also was also my “test” bench for various VMs and hardware (until I got Luna below), and ran my “work” computer for around a year using a Quadro 2000 and HP zero client. With a Quadro 2000, 2x IBM M1015, and a Mellanox ConnectX-2, I was out of PCIe slots that could physically fit all the cards (there’s 3x x16 and 3x x4 slots, and all the cards are x8 except for the Quadro 2000). I bought a StarTech adapter PCI Express X1 to X16 Low Profile Slot Extension Adapter that could make an x16 low profile card fit into a x1 full height slot, and placed one of the M1015’s on there. I didn’t notice any performance issues, probably because I wasn’t doing anything too disk intensive, and the Quadro 2000 is retired now freeing up the slot for the M1015 again.
Photos:
SC846:
Supermicro X10SAT:
X10SAT installed:
Intel SAS expander mounted "creatively" to the side:
Last edited:
