New build

I'm looking to build a home server that will be an all-in-one with Open Indiana.

How does this look so far?

Supermicro X10SL7-F
E3 1230 V3
Samsung 16 gb ECC ram
Norco case?
Corsair PSU
6 x 4tb WD Reds

Any thoughts? What case would you suggest to provide expansion if needed. (was thinking of a rack mount 20ish bay.

Anything wrong that you can see? Suggestions?

Thanks!!

-Mike

I dont think you will be satisfied with the limited ammount of memory that board can handle. For AIO I generally don't want less than 32gb. 8gb alone will be used for omnios.

Just remember that you cant boot off of a controller you plan on passing to omnios. That limits you to 10 6gbps drives with omnios, unless you add a controller. Get a m1050 and flash it to it mode. Pass that and the onboard sas controller to omnios.

Norco backplanes suck, get a supermicro 16 bay case. Easy to find on ebay, even comes with a power supply most of thd time.

Get 2x Crucial m550 256gb drives for zil, you'll want them.

I have to disagree with a lot bds1904 is saying here.

For most, 32 GB will be fine. It obviously depends on the number of virtual machines and their workload. Ask yourself what you want to use the AIO for and base your build on that. If a 32GB maximum is fine, then that board and CPU combo will make you very happy.

I think the "m1050" is a typo and he means an M1015 - if so, he's right and it's a great controller.

You don't necessarily need to worry about having an SSD for your ZIL. As I mentioned above, you need to decide if you can live without sync writes or if the performance increase a SLOG will give you is worth the money. If you decide to get a SLOG, do some research and find a drive with low latency and some form of power loss protection. And don't get two - it will not increase performance.

Last, you'll probably want to look at OmniOS instead of OpenIndiana.

spazoid said:

I have to disagree with a lot bds1904 is saying here.

For most, 32 GB will be fine. It obviously depends on the number of virtual machines and their workload. Ask yourself what you want to use the AIO for and base your build on that. If a 32GB maximum is fine, then that board and CPU combo will make you very happy.

I think the "m1050" is a typo and he means an M1015 - if so, he's right and it's a great controller.

You don't necessarily need to worry about having an SSD for your ZIL. As I mentioned above, you need to decide if you can live without sync writes or if the performance increase a SLOG will give you is worth the money. If you decide to get a SLOG, do some research and find a drive with low latency and some form of power loss protection. And don't get two - it will not increase performance.

Last, you'll probably want to look at OmniOS instead of OpenIndiana.

Click to expand...

He only specified he was using 16gb, I reccomended 32gb.

It was a typo, should be m1015.

Only 1 slog? Best practice is to mirror for data security. He is using this as a aio, which means he is using it as a nfs datastore. Nfs performance will be better with a slog, unless he can stand loosing up to 30 seconds of writes in the even of power faliure. From my experience, when using nfs with sync disabled, I always lost enough data to corrupt vm hard disks if I had a kernel panic or ups failure.

You are right, 2 slog wont increase performance, it increases redundancy. Omnios and oi have a habbit of freaking out and shutting down if you loose a slog and dont have a mirror of it.

Sorry. I probably should have mentioned what it would be used for.

1. Media server. bluray rips, etc.
2. surveillance server. Not sure which yet.
3. backups for home computers. Using windows home server now.
4. Still have room to grow.

If 32 gb is that much better I can do that.

How much better would the supermicro case be? How are they better? It's quite a bit more expensive.

When I add more drives can I use an expander on this mb or would I have to buy a card?

Thanks for the help!!

-Mike

The supermicro cases typically come with really good power supplies, usually redundant. The backplanes in them are very high quality and sturdy. Norco has a history of defective backplanes. The supermicro case is also made of thicker steel.

Considering you can get an entire complete 16 bay server ready for redundant power supplies for $290 on ebay, take the mobo, processors and ram and resell it for $100. You end up with a case with 16 hotswap bays and redundant power ready for $190. Thats far cheaper than a norco and a power supply. The one that is typically included is 800w.

For the best performace stay away from an expander. Your mobo has 8sas ports you can pass to your storage os. If you add a ibm m1015 you'll have another 8 giving you 16 total. You could fully populate the 16 bays with no problem. For boot disk and local datastore I would just stick a ssd somewhere in the case.

bds1904 said:

He only specified he was using 16gb, I reccomended 32gb.

It was a typo, should be m1015.

Only 1 slog? Best practice is to mirror for data security. He is using this as a aio, which means he is using it as a nfs datastore. Nfs performance will be better with a slog, unless he can stand loosing up to 30 seconds of writes in the even of power faliure. From my experience, when using nfs with sync disabled, I always lost enough data to corrupt vm hard disks if I had a kernel panic or ups failure.

You are right, 2 slog wont increase performance, it increases redundancy. Omnios and oi have a habbit of freaking out and shutting down if you loose a slog and dont have a mirror of it.

Click to expand...

30 seconds? The ZIL is written every 5 seconds unless under very intensive load IIRC.
Regarding the "freaking out and shutting down" I have no knowledge of this. Do you have a source for your information? Bug report perhaps?

I'm not disputing the fact that mirroring your SLOG is best practice, but this is a home server presumably mostly used for low load virtual machines and media storage. Spending hundreds of dollars on preventing an event that is very unlikely to happen might not be the best way to spend those dollars.

spazoid said:

30 seconds? The ZIL is written every 5 seconds unless under very intensive load IIRC.
Regarding the "freaking out and shutting down" I have no knowledge of this. Do you have a source for your information? Bug report perhaps?

I'm not disputing the fact that mirroring your SLOG is best practice, but this is a home server presumably mostly used for low load virtual machines and media storage. Spending hundreds of dollars on preventing an event that is very unlikely to happen might not be the best way to spend those dollars.

Click to expand...

Current version of omnios+nappit on my server, if I offine or unplug slog device kernel panics and shuts down. If I have a mirror, it doesn't. Even oi did it, and that was a completely different server.

Spending a extra $155 on an extra ssd is worth not spending 2hrs restoring my backups.

Note the up-to 30 seconds. I have lost enough data running sync disabled at home to know better. Ssd's are cheap, when paired with a aio using nfs they kick butt plus the data security is nice. When using nfs, everything is a sync write. Running sync disabled and having a kernel panic or power failure will result in corrupt filesystems on the vm eventually.

I'm not saying SSD's are expensive. Neither is RAM. Neither is upgrading to a faster CPU. And getting a redundant PSU isn't too bad either. Hey, you can get a 10 gbit NIC off of ebay quite cheap as well. And why not get a hotswap backplane? That's only like 80 bucks!

My point is - nothing is really that expensive by itself. But does it make sense in your environment? I don't think it does in this setup. And it's not 155 dollars - it's 2x 155 dollars.

You're saying you have kernel panics when you remove a SLOG. Well, then the SLOG is the source of your issue, not the solution in my mind.

Anyway, it's easy to add a SLOG (or a mirrored SLOG for that matter) later. So just as is recommended with L2ARC devices - try it out without it, add it if needed. Don't assume you need it and risk wasting your money.

If you are running OpenZFS, losing a SLOG device shouldn't be a disaster as long as you dont also lose power at the same time.

Speeds will slow to a crawl , however.