Recent content by Bisu

The RAID1 for guest OS datastores is a good idea, but for storage you could just create a bunch of volumes in FreeNAS and share them with your other VMs. With 18 drives left over, you could do RAIDZ3 and have triple parity if you are really worried about drives failing while you resilver.

Oh thanks, I didn't know they got rid of the processor limit. Although I'm not running anything that processor intensive anyway; ZFS needs RAM more than anything.

You don't need a dual socket board, and it would probably be a waste unless you plan on buying an ESXi license for more than 1 processor. The free license for ESXi allows you to use 1 processor with as many cores as you want, and up to 32GB of ram. As for ESX 4 or ESXi 5.1, I'm using ESXi 5.1...

You could save $50 or so by getting a Supermicro X9SCL+-F board and putting $30 into an Intel E3 1230 V2 to get hyperthreading. Here's a link to some price comparisons: (Canadian pricing though) http://www.pricebat.ca/mbd-x9scl-f-b-supermicro-matx-lga1155-ddr3-ecc/

Those Silverstone cases are great mATX cases, but if you want expandability, I would go with a Fractal Design R4. It is a very quiet ATX case and has 8 drive bays. When/if you want to ever add a NAS, you would only need to purchase a SAS card and more HDDs. Then setup a FreeNAS vm with ZFS...

You should check if you can passthrough your boards SATA controller through ESXi. If you can, then you should make a VM with freeNAS or other OS of your choice and raid with ZFS.

I think a lot of people had your idea because I just did a search and found one at $70 and a bunch of them at around $100 too.

Well I did a lot of searching, and I finally found the m1015 for under $100. Here

Are there any other comparable cards to the m1015? Apparently this card is has shot up in price over the past few months.

I have a bit of a bias for Intel CPUs, and the majority of the money is going to go into storage. I'll check out the IBM controller though. Which boards would you suggest? Are there any differences between the C204 and C202 chipsets besides the 2 SATA III ports in the C204?

Hi, I'm fairly new to virtualization, and am planning on building a new all-in-one server to experiment on. Would you guys please give me some suggestions and answer a few questions on what hardware I need? Here's what I'm thinking of getting: Mobo - X9SCL+ -F CPU - Xeon E3 1230v2...