Show us your servers / NAS boxes!

[Rick Sanchez]

Good and valid responses Guess it's back to the drawing board...

[keyser666]

Have the following at home for a lab enivronment, makes such a fricking racket in my one bed flat

Proliant DL585 G5
Proliant DL480 G4 x 2

[reverend]

Haha Jesus I've got the 585 G5 here too and it shakes the walls in my house when it's turned on - thinking of offloading it as I don't give it the use it deserves!

[keyser666]

Thing is I could not use any hypervisor on the DL480 G4's because fo their hardware architecture, if it was a G5 and above I would have been fine so had to get a new box. I need it for continual self training but dont use them for a NAS as cant have that running all the time, sounds like I am at the bottom of the runway at heathrow when starting up. Mind you i dont have to have the heating on when I start them up, flat heated in like 5 mins flat!

[Rick Sanchez]

I've found the king of motherboards for what I need.

Case: X-Case 24 Bay Case
CPU:
Motherboard: ASRock C2750D4I
RAM:
PSU:
SATA Expansion Card: 1x IBM M1015 - Sold the other two
Cables:

[Mr.James]

Wow, that mobo really is a beast! If I was building my NAS again that is defo get one of those...

I've noticed that it has an Intel I210 network card. I'd check the exact model number of the card because Intel don't support Windows server on the I217-V and I218-V cards and the drivers won't install.

There is a dirty hack to get them working but it's worth finding out before hand if you're gonna run into a problem before you begin the install, rather than being stuck in Windows without a working NIC.


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[Rick Sanchez]

Wow, that mobo really is a beast! If I was building my NAS again that is defo get one of those...

I'm going to build a NAS/Server hybrid with the help from you guys

I've noticed that it has an Intel I210 network card. I'd check the exact model number of the card because Intel don't support Windows server on the I217-V and I218-V cards and the drivers won't install.

There is a dirty hack to get them working but it's worth finding out before hand if you're gonna run into a problem before you begin the install, rather than being stuck in Windows without a working NIC.

I was thinking about creating a few VMs; UnRAID being one of them

[Mr.James]

This is more or less the same thing as what I've done. I went with Hyper-V server for virtualisation as it lets you pass through your hard drives direct to the VMs for better performance. It also means you don't have to format them which was the biggest win for me over VMWare. Definitely worth messing about with drivers, provided the same can be done with that model NIC.

I set up one of the VMs (all Debian Linux rather than unRAID) as the main NAS and attached all but one of the drives (hyper-v boot drive) to it. I call this the FileBox, it runs sabnzb, sickbeard, sabnzb, couchpotato, headphones and transmission.
I've then got 5 more VMs for different functions:
MusicBrainzBox - MusicBrainz server for local Headphones lookups
Newzbox - Newznab server for local sickbeard/couchpotato/headphones usenet searches
Streambox - minidlna for streaming to windows media player, airvideo for streaming video to idevices, subsonic for streaming music to idevices and both music and video via a YouTube-ish web page
OwnCloudBox - OwnCloud private cloud server for backing up parents files to the filebox
And a test vm for messing about with

So if setting up any of those things are on your list, I should be able to give you some pointers!

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[Rick Sanchez]

Yes I will do, is the Hyper-V option easier? I'm all for easy

What 24 bay case would you choice and why?

http://www.xcase.co.uk/rackmount-cases/4u-rackmount-server-cases.html

[Over Carl]

Having tried both Hyper-V and ESXi I would say the difficulty in setting up a small home setup isn't much different and it boils down to preferences and individual use cases.

For example Mr James said it was a deal breaker that he couldn't pass through a drive direct. With my setup I was seeing something like 400 Megabytes/sec from my RAID so I would have found the bottleneck to be my gig LAN rather than disk access. However once I tried both, the fact the ESXi let me overallocate RAM/CPU by at least a factor of two meant I could never consider HyperV again.

I like the board btw. The only snag I can think is with 4 (?) RAID SATA interfaces, I doubt you could pool them together to make bigger RAIDs, I'm guessing you would have separate RAID's for each controller (if the controller supports RAID).

[Mr.James]

Yes I will do, is the Hyper-V option easier? I'm all for easy

What 24 bay case would you choice and why?

http://www.xcase.co.uk/rackmount-cases/4u-rackmount-server-cases.html

I wouldn't say it was easier, Windows Hyper-V server is free because it's a 'core' version of Windows so you only get a command line interface... Plus it only runs Hyper-V (and a couple of other features like iSCSI and failover clustering but I guess you won't need those) so there's not a massive amount you can do with it (there's no .net support for example).

Saying that, because it is so stripped down, there's not much to do in terms of configuring it. And once it's sorted there's not much need to reboot it, I installed windows updates for the first time in 4 months the other day. It found two it needed to install so there's not much babysitting to do.

The reason I think Hyper-V will be more suitable is that when I had a play with VMWare (only for a very short evening), there was no way of attaching the physical disks to the virtual machines. This meant VMware had to format the disks to a file system of it's liking (not NTFS) so if you're running a Windows installation at the minute, there's going to be a lot of moving stuff around to empty drives before importing them into VMWare and formatting them.

VMWare will then let you create a virtual hard disk file on the new disk you have imported. This again set alarm bells ringing for me, what if this file gets damaged? You have the potential to lose virtually everything inside it. Failing that, what sort of recovery tools are available for extracting files out of the virtual hard disk file if you can't copy the entire thing? It's a question I never bothered searching for the answer to. I know that I can just remove a corrupted disk from one of my VMs, place it in another PC and run gparted or other recovery tools to get it working or recover individual files.

Another reason I think you'd be better off with Hyper-V is because you mentioned that you want this to conserve power. With VMWare, because the disks are connected to the host, the virtual machine has no control over the power functions, and from what I've read, VMWare won't spin the disks down itself either. If you have 20 disks attached in your server, all 20 will be spinning all of the time. That's gonna be a lot of electric.

Reading about unRAID, it likes to power down drives when they're in use to conserve electric. I remember you saying you were keen for this server to conserve power so I'm guessing that this is a killer feature for you... and if it is, then it will rule out VMWare.

With regards to the cases... Wow those are massive lol... That main board you've got is gonna get lost in there. These are proper rack mount servers but I got the impression this was a home NAS box? Where you gonna stick the thing? In the shed? lol

I wouldn't get anything like that for a home server to be honest. Way, way over the sort of spec I need. If I had to get it for work, I'd get the £299 red one, mainly for the reason that it would match my Lefthand P4300s lol http://www.senetic.co.uk/i/norm/low/4146908-HP.jpg

Another reason (and a better one) is that it supports mini-sas. It has 6 sockets (each connecting 4 drives) and you can get a 4x SATA to 1 mini-SAS conversion cable for cheap.

By my calculations though you only need a 20 bay case though. The mainboard will be able to connect a 12 drives with 3x SATA to miniSAS conversion cables. The IBM M1015 has 2 miniSAS ports and the backplane has 6 miniSAS sockets, with each connecting 4 drives. This means that the M1015 card will only be able to connect 8 drives, rather than it's maximum 16, meaning you'll be able to fit in a maximum of 20 drives...

Unless I've overlooked something of course... I've mainly been skim reading as I'm a bit pushed for time...

[eblaster101]

Esxi allows raid cards to pass through so they are detected cleanly on the os

[reverend]

In terms of performance guys you're talking 1% difference between an RDM (passed through disk) in VMware and a VMDK virtual disk - it's negligible tbh.

VMFS is actually a very robust filesystem - although as Mr James says for home users you will find your way around an NTFS volume a lot easier with recovery disks. I've possibly been lucky but i've yet to see a VMFS filesystem corrupt - you can get a Linux FUSE driver to read VMFS though if you absolutely have to last resort!

[Rick Sanchez]

I meant ASRock E3C226D2I lol, that other board is rumoured to be £300+ and I don't think I want to spend that on a motherboard for a home file etc server.

I want expandability, hotswap and the option of ESXi. Too much choice dammit!

[reverend]

Something random, but take a look on eBay at Dell XS23's - they're 4 computers in a smallish rack server but have 12 hot swappable drive bays!

It'll be noisy as f*ck but if you're hiding it away in a garage maybe something like that would work?

[Rick Sanchez]

I live in a ground flat; no garage!

[reverend]

Bugger that's a shame - I'm tempted to get one of those XS23's myself as my 4 IBM servers don't appear to run ESXi 5.5 - need to spend some time playing with that tomorrow

[Rick Sanchez]

So what case would you get? Or would you recommend another case?

[reverend]

I really don't know PC cases mate - saw these a while ago though:

http://www.netstor.com.tw/_03/products_rackmount.htm

They're beasts but would easily cope with what you want to do mate - they've even got that 48 bay one!

[Rick Sanchez]

Well it's crunch time on my new server; 12 bay or 24 bay and why? £50 price difference.

Case choices:
1. 12 bay = £238.80 inc vat // 650mm

http://www.xcase.co.uk/rackmount-cas...backplane.html

2. 24 bay [home] = £286.80 // 550mm

http://www.xcase.co.uk/rackmount-cas...luded-107.html

Apparently it is a tight fit.

3. 24 bay [standard] = £298.80 // 650mm

http://www.xcase.co.uk/rackmount-cas...-included.html

My dilema is 5TB Reds are out soon as well as 6TB drives and the 12 bay can apparently hold 14 drives which is more than enough I think. Would you agree?