I am planning on virtualizing my home server with ESXi. The box will be built on a supermicro Supermicro X9SRE-F with a Xeon 2620v2.
Server is a gateway and a file server so i need a good storage solution to keep all the photo memories alive. With this in mind i was planning of getting LSI SAS2008 and passing it through to a freebsd virtual machine with raid-z (3HDDS) (this is what i am currently running and have experience with)
Virtualising will open up a whole new oportunities and i am planning to run a number of virtual machines (win server, linux, pfsense e.t.c)
My main question is what will be the storage strategy for the virtual machines as the motherboard onboard intel raid will not work
I have around 6 320 HDD laying around which i am planning to use.
So 1 option will be running another raidz pool of the LSI and servicing it as a iSCSI back to the VMWARE
1a passthrough the intel sata to another freebsd/solaris machine (do i understand correctly passing through onboard SATA controller is close to an impossible task?)
2. Give each virtual machine it's own HDD (no redundancy)
3. Please advice. Hardware raid is well a little bit of the budget i think
4. look at competing products?
It sounds like a way over engineered solution for your photo's, I would personally try and keep it a s simple as possible and separate out the home lab from personal treasures that you really don't want to lose or have the admin task of maintaining the infrastructure (including backups etc.). A simple redundant copy on a NAS device, or cloud solution (for example https://copy.com/?r=Sac8Np) would be my preference.
That said, it's awesome to have a home lab to play around with all the different technologies ![]()
Cheers,
Jon
Currently i am running FBSD 9.2 with all the tasks. So i was thinking of virtualising to give me more space to play.
The main strategy is to have as few boxes as possible and that is why i am considering ESXi and the solution overviewed in the first post. It will definetly work as a storage solution for FBSD+ZFS and in case of any failure i will be able to attach the ZFS to any other Freebsd physical box. The only question is how to add redundance for the virtual machines as MB fake raid is not supported
