@nandor wrote:
Summary
Hi all. I have been lurking and reading threads both here and on the FreeNAS forums for a while. I have finally decided to order my new hardware for a home server and am leaning towards using RockStor as my NAS solution. The only thing that has me leaning towards FreeNAS is the /slightly/ more modern web GUI it has and iSCSI support. But, I would really prefer to stay Linux based and not FreeBSD which is where RockStor is winning me over. Before I get into the specifics does anyone know if there are plans on the horizon to modernize (or sexy-up) the RockStor GUI or is the desire to leave it more utilitarian (nothing wrong with that either just asking)
That said I have already purchased a full version of RockStor because I as a Software Dev I like to support these projects even if I don’t end up using them. I think there is some great work being done here and a good community to boot.
Here is the setup I am looking at:
Setup
- 1x Cisco UCS C240 M4SX Chasis w/ 2x E5-2650v3 CPUs - 40 Cores / 64G ram
- 1x SCSI12G Hardware Raid Card
- 24x 600GB 10k RPM Drives in Raid 6 for a total of ~13TB
[Note: Since this is an HW Raid 6 it should work just fine with BTRFS which will just see it as contiguous storage - right?]
- ESXi running as the Main OS
- RockStor inside a VM
- Serving NFS/SMB to the house - Windows Snapshot enabled.
- ESXi spinning up VMs for the kids that can be nuked (when) they completely screw up their machines.
Primary Use Cases
- Plex Transcoding
- Sonos Music Hosting
- VM Storage Share
- PC Storage Share
- Local Backups
Questions
[Q0: How much CPU/Ram should I allocate to RockStor - not looking for minimums here but a good solid baseline to make things run smooth.]
[Q1: Is there a guide on optimal RockStor/VM setup? I have seen a few threads but many are dated and what I would really like to know is the best way to expose the drives to RockStor / current status of network bonding support].
[Q2: Is there an optimal way to expose the drives to RockStor? Create a normal slim VMDK on the disk and let it fill up - or create it in thick mode - or link directly to the block device?]
[Q3:
Network bonding - Supported? Worth it? How many NICs / what type?] : Supported and wokring, unit tests missing.@Flox to confirm.Confirmed but untested.[Q4: Will anything in this setup severely negatively impact my disk performance?]
[Q5: Best way to share media from RockStor VM to Plex Media Server VM running on same phsyical hardware - should I just increase the compute on the RS VM and run PMS alongside or should I use NFS with 2 different purpose built VMs (I prefer the second but happy to hear other opinions)]
[Q6: Anything else I missed or should be thinking about?]
Thanks, everyone.
Posts: 5
Participants: 3