Hey sean, I still haven't gotten an e-mail from you, I just PM'ed you to make sure you have my right email, please shoot me an email as soon as possible, thanks!
The SSDs were cheap, only 40 bucks for both, my intention was initially to RAID 1 them together, but I ended up needing the other for another VM, so they are both independent and on the system SATA bus. So the best use of the SSD would be for an l2arc, and I'd need to pass through an additional...
Hi all, I have an ESXi server all-in-one build based off of _Gea's excellent guide with the following specs:
Quad-Core Xeon w/ Hyperthreading
16GB of RAM
IBM M1015 in IT Mode
8x3TB Hard drives in a RAID-Z2 with ~15TB of usable storage.
2x16GB SSDs set up to hold the OpenIndiana VM image...
Thanks for the bump, yeah this is an excellent card especially considering the out of band management interface. The cables are SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cables, which would pair perfectly with this case (what I was going to do).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038
So I bought this Areca RAID card with plans to build a massive file server but other priorities got in the way, so my loss is your gain. It comes with the original box, manual, and six SFF-8087 cables The same model is selling for over $1000 on Newegg as seen here...
For anyone wondering, I took the advice of those in this thread, and I ended up selling the 1.5TBs and buying more 3TBs for a total of 8x3TB drives in a RAID-Z2. Performance is killer with ZFS!
First off, you're off to a good start, I just built a very similar box for ESXi (supermicro board, m1015), but you're missing a few things.
First, like danswartz said, you're need a 2.5" ssd or laptop drive to run the OS on, ideally a small (16-32GB) one as that's all you'll need.
Second...