What have I done!!! or What to do?

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smithse79

Active Member
Sep 17, 2014
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So, I was browsing another forum the other night and saw a link to an amazing deal for a Supermicro X10SRH-CF motherboard. After some quick research I decided to go ahead to buy it. Now I'm almost having some buyer's remorse, I have no idea what to do with it.

I currently have a Dell Cs24-TY with 2x L5520 Xeons and 36GB of RAM that I use for Hyper-V, with my DC, DHCP, and DNS in one VM, Plex in another VM, and other VMs as needed. I also have a CS24-SC with 2x L5420 Xeons and 8GB of RAM that runs Centos that I use for converting/compressing movies for Plex and is soon to be that basis for a ZOL fileserver. To that end I also recently purchased a Dell J23 enclosure. It's just waiting for hard drives.

I could move everything up a tier and get rid of the CS24-SC making the TY into the ZFS server and the new machine my VM host. But this will take a while as I piece together the new server. I could replace everything entirely with the new box but I want ZFS for the fileserver and Windows for everything else which means virtualizing ZFS. Or I could sell the new motherboard for a profit and just go with what I've got.
 

OBasel

Active Member
Dec 28, 2010
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Personally I'd try savin' money unless you got features and functionality you don't have and really need.
 

Joel

Active Member
Jan 30, 2015
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As much as people claim that ZoL is ready for primetime, I'm still skeptical with something as important as my data. Why not use FreeNAS in a VM with a LSI RAID card in JBOD mode? Bonus points that it has a plugin for Plex that's trivial to set up...
 

TeeJayHoward

Active Member
Feb 12, 2013
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Personally, I'd sell the motherboard and pocket the profit. My reasoning? You're already running a full-Dell setup. There's something sexy about looking at a stack of hardware and having it all come from one manufacturer.

That's right. I'm suggesting a course of action based solely on how attractive the result looks. Not functionality. Looks. :D
 
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canta

Well-Known Member
Nov 26, 2014
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As much as people claim that ZoL is ready for primetime, I'm still skeptical with something as important as my data. Why not use FreeNAS in a VM with a LSI RAID card in JBOD mode? Bonus points that it has a plugin for Plex that's trivial to set up...
ZoL is stable on my understanding as long as not using LUKS (disk encryption).
2 running ZoL under centos 7.X and 1 running centos 6.5.

on my simple solution, never, never and never virtualized NAS, let make a real machine.
when using VM, and something happens... troubleshooting is not easy.
 
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Joel

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Jan 30, 2015
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on my simple solution, never, never and never virtualized NAS, let make a real machine.
when using VM, and something happens... troubleshooting is not easy.
That's probably the best way to go. FWIW, FreeNAS reccommends exactly this. When people choose to virtualize it, the best pathway is to PCI passthrough the JBOD controller, then the VM gets access to the raw disks, complete with SMART support.
 

TeeJayHoward

Active Member
Feb 12, 2013
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ZoL is stable on my understanding as long as not using LUKS (disk encryption).
I've got two CentOS 7 VMs running a little under 100TB raw storage on ZoL. It's been working just fine for about a year now. I had my first disk failure yesterday, and it recovered like it was supposed to. Just one more data point, but at this point I'd feel comfortable recommending it to hobbyists.
 

smithse79

Active Member
Sep 17, 2014
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At this point I've decided to go ahead and sell the MB and go ahead with my original plan. I'll put ZOL on my Centos 6.5 box. I'll probably keep Plex on the windows machine since it is a beefier computer and it's been running there for several months and has all of my config data and metadata already in place.
 

smithse79

Active Member
Sep 17, 2014
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Unfortunately no, it was only up for a couple hours. It was on Amazon, and almost seemed like a pricing mistake honestly, but I got it for what they showed. I've got someone asking me in PM about purchasing it but for some reason I can't reply, I keep getting Internal Server Error. So if you're reading this, I'm trying to respond....
 

canta

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Nov 26, 2014
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I've got two CentOS 7 VMs running a little under 100TB raw storage on ZoL. It's been working just fine for about a year now. I had my first disk failure yesterday, and it recovered like it was supposed to. Just one more data point, but at this point I'd feel comfortable recommending it to hobbyists.
no worry, I already replace 3 failed HDs so far...
I recommend to SOHO with a backup :D. yeah backup is important....
 
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