Recent content by jaknell1011

This is turning into a great thread for people to realize the potential and power that a budget low power system can provide. I had no idea people were able to do so much with such efficient systems! I am still favoring a workstation build, but it is cool to see people running what I am...

I used ISCSI with ZFS on FreeNAS and it easily outperformed the NFS option, but to me the management was so much easier on NFS I ended up going with it in production. I had so much overkill as far as processing and storage was concerned that I could take the hit and not notice. I will say...

That is a sweet board! That definitely looks like a home virt lab dream, but my budget is $900-1000. I will have to look at something like that in a couple years, as there is no way I can get my storage and accessories (I would need a case and power supply as well) with that system in my budget.

That is exactly what I am leaning towards...a Z800 or similar. I just want to make sure a new FX-8350 won't outperform one of these, while also being quieter and more energy efficient. Does anyone have any sort of comparison between Xeons vs a FX-8350? To me this seems like a no brainer to go...

Yeah I saw someone run VMware workstation and virtualize his hosts, and then still use the original machine for gaming...thought it was interesting. The plan is to utilize the 4TB for file storage mostly, and for non critical VMs, then utilize the SSDs for VM OS drives. I would think with SSDs...

I am torn between looking on Ebay for an old server with Dual Xeons, or building my own Fx-8350 platform. I am going to be running 5 or so VM's: 1 storage, 1 DC, 1 Sophos Home Firewall, and a few test servers. I have about $1,000 to spend, and when I design my own build and price it out it comes...

That sounds like it would work well. One problem I have is that at the moment, I have my file storage on the datastore along with all of my VMs. It is presented to the VM as a separate disk (call it D:). There are 2 disks, "fs1.vmdk" is the C: OS drive. "fs1_1.vmdk" is the D: files drive. Would...

Yes I am fairly certain I do want to go with one of those "pay more because it says certified" types of devices. I will be going to a part time contract type position with the school (12 hours a month) and I will not be there immediately if there is a problem. Now on the FreeNAS, we were at 250...

So if I don't go with Synology, is there another hardware solution WITH SUPPORT and on the Vmware HCL that you can recommend? I am running FreeNAS on a dell c6100 blade and using ZFS in RAIDZ2. It works, but again, having a problem and not having support is the big obstacle I'm trying to overcome.

I am currently presenting it via ISCSI, but I plan on switching to NFS. NFS just seems simpler and easier to manage and troubleshoot. In my testing before, ISCSI was 15% faster on average with FreeNAS but I really don't think we will notice a difference like that in production. The only...

Thanks so much for all of the input! Yes, the biggest concern is lack of support, and knowing that if I have a problem I can call either Vmware or Synology is a huge bonus for me. Especially considering I do not plan on being here forever and I doubt anyone they hire going forward will have too...

**Tried to break up the paragraph so I don't get too many TLDRs.** I am currently running 3 ESXi hosts on an ISCSI FreeNAS system for our private K-8 school with 9 VMs. Having no support and being completely dependent on this open source software is keeping me up at night. I am trying to...