Will this build work well?

[Pr3dict]

I just ordered a bunch of stuff haha so I'm hoping what I bought will work.

I'm looking to make an all-in-one homeserver build with the following VMs

1. ZFS Based Parity/pooling solution
   
   2 separate Vdevs​
2. Pfsense router - Also handle a VPN server? Unless I need to create a diff VM so that I can connect to my home network when I am away
3. A Seperate VM to run my NVR IP camera software
4. Emby/Plex media server for all my home media

The parts that I have are:

• 16- bay Supermicro case
• 8x 4TB drives
• 4x 3TB drives
• X10SL7-F with LSI 2308 onboard for 14 direct SAS/SATA ports
• E3-1241 V3
• 32GB UnBuffered ECC RAM
• Intel i340-T2 dual gigabit for a total of 4-Gigabit ethernet ports

I'm hoping the E3-1241 V3 can handle the work load.

Any thoughts? Did I totally screw this up lol?

 

[pricklypunter]

You might be pushing it with your camera system on top of everything else, these NVR systems are resource hogs usually. If you're careful, you might just get away with it. While you can run pfsense in a VM on the same host, I'm not sure I would want to. If your main host were to suddenly hang or something else goes wrong that required you to gain access remotely to the onboard IPMI to fix it, you're going to be sol if your firewall is also down and you have no VPN. Things like firewalls are best kept on their own hardware if at all possible. Perhaps set it up and gain some experience with it, then move it over to its own platform at a later stage? The rest of your plan should be fine and dandy, you might also consider adding a 4 port nic for the VM's and using the two onboard ones for out of band management

 

[Pr3dict]

Well that's good to know

As for the router I was thinking of separating it also. I'll look into that.

What do you mean out of band management?

 

[pricklypunter]

I'm talking about where your actual management of the infrastructure runs within its own dedicated network, rather than on your main LAN. Using a serial or console port for example, could also be regarded as OOB. Think of it as anywhere you separate your management data for the device from the normal communication path of said device. In this case it's a separate Ethernet network. This has a couple of benefits. Not having a congested network causing interference to other network users for one, Greater security, as your management traffic does not traverse your LAN for another, ability to perform critical management tasks even if the normal network is unavailable etc

 

[Pr3dict]

I figured that could run on a separate management vlan. Isn't it possible to trunk one of the ethernet ports that come out of the server?

Also looking at the vms that I am planning to use there isn't much management needed. The esxi host needs it's own network but the other things will be running on the main network

 

[pricklypunter]

There's nothing to stop you from creating a trunk port with only one of the onboard nics if that's what you wish, it's just a single point of failure that I would rather avoid if I was relying on remote access. Also, if you do that, make sure it's not the nic that your IPMI will fail over to if you have that set, especially important if your running pfsense

 

[Pr3dict]

Thanks. I'll have to do more research. As long as what I have is good to transcode some 1080p streams and also run the NAS, I think I'll be good

 

[pricklypunter]

I certainly don't really see any big issues with your plan. Your primary limiting factor will be RAM of course. The NAS/ ZFS wants memory more than anything else, but 12-16GB gets you a long way, as will having native compression set on your pools etc. Plex is usually fine with much less memory, I run my Plex with 6GB, but I'm not transcoding much. PFSense doesn't need much either, 4GB is probably good enough if you want to play with things like snort, if not you can reduce that. I don't know what your NVR will want, but I'm sure you could squeeze things a bit here and there to give it enough to run reasonably smooth.

Get a build thread going in the DIY forum when you start putting it all together