Advice needed for file server/media server/work machine

[ekological]

Hey all,

I built a file server in 2009 using some Intel celeron CPU and a server motherboard running WHS. My main focus was power consumption since it would be on 24/7. I have a 3Ware 9650SE 16 port raid controller connected to initially four WD 2TB enterprise drives (WD2002FYPS). At the time, the drives were $300 a pop, so the thought was that I would just expand as I needed. I first experimented with OpenSolaris, but I couldn't get squeezebox to work with .wma lossless files because I needed the 64-bit install for the large storage pool and the 64-bit codecs didn't work (Windows media center doesn't support flac and I wanted the HTPC and the squeezebox to both be able to play the music files). Also, I had an issue with ZFS and growing the array and it almost seemed like ZFS' biggest advantage was doing software RAID, anyway.

On my workstation, I would run Win7 and then VMWare Workstation on it to run two XP VMs--one for personal use and one for work (where I could VPN to work and separate traffic). My workstation recently had a stick of RAM go bad and it sucked whenever I had a brownout, etc whereas I have a big UPS for the file server; thus, I recently figured that I would just run the Win7 VMs on the server in the basement which has power backup, etc and remote desktop into the VMs from either the workstation or my laptop.

So I now have a Supermicro X9SCM-F w/ 16GB ECC RAM, Intel E3-1230, OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD along with the 3Ware 9650SE raid controller. I'm kind of new to this and yet not (having used VMWare Workstation for the past few years), but I could use some guidance for a game plan, if you will. I am also building pretty much the same configuration for a friend (except using a LSI SAS 9280-16i4e).

I have been running ESXi 4.1 for a few weeks now, but it is all pretty basic stuff. I've read briefly about RDM, but I don't think I would benefit from it as it seems to be geared more towards SAN functionality. Here's what I want to do:

- Win7 VM for personal use
- Win7 VM for work
- Win7 VM for a passed through Ceton cablecard tuner which then exposes the individual tuners as network devices so that any HTPC in the house can use those tuners and also have the USB passed through from the UPS to power down the server if I should have a sustained blackout.
- WHS 2011 to serve up files?

It's the last bullet that has me thinking:
- Do I boot from an OS drive (the SSD) and pass through the hardware raid card to the WHS 2011 VM? Would this be the only way to see the 26TB of storage? Personally, I'm not tied too closely to WHS since I only use it for its integration to windows media center. If push came to shove, I would want to go with whatever robust file server option there is.

What I didn't want to do (if this even possible) was have one large single file that represents a virtual disk. If something goes bad, I'm hosed, right? Is it safer to pass the hardware raid controller to a guest VM so that I can still see individual files on the raid array?

Or should I (if this is even possible) set up yet another VM that will have the controller passed through that is a flavor of linux for robustness and use that as an iscsi target and have the WHS2011 VM access that?

Any performance penalties associated with passing the controller through? Should I be looking at installing ESXi on a USB stick (the motherboard has a USB header)? I think my friend was hoping not to have to have any drives in the server other than the ones attached to the raid card, but I think with the pass through, it's necessary to have an additional ESXi/VM drive.

I appreciate any thoughts and comments.

TIA,
Chester

 

[meatincereal]

have you looked at http://www.napp-it.org/doc/downloads/all-in-one.pdf ?

 

[mk4umha]

Have you learned anything new since? I'm planning on find the same thing as you and was wondering what the pros and cons that you ran into.

 

[Budman17r]

Personally there are several ways to get the drives to show. ISCSI, Napp it, Make multiple disks on the data store (if there is a drive size limit). You can add the disks through Vmware (Create a data store, create more or a single disk and attach that to the virtual machine.

Does that make sense?

 

[Enlightend]

The thing with WHS storage vs a ZFS system, is that WHS, if you want redundancy, can waste space rather badly, giving you no more redundancy over Raid 5 or 6 while not having all that great multi disk performance either.

Using a setup like "Any Linux or Solaris Version/Offspring" with or without a web head (depends on your competency in admining torugh a console), RAW mapping your storage disks to the VM, will keep your data much safer, while also giving splendid performance.

You can still run a WHS server on a minimal virtual disk, next to the Linux/Solaris storage VM, connected to it with iSCSI or NFS/CIFS shares.

You can go as far as delete your NAS VM, create a new one, raw mapping the drives back to the new VM, boot it with another softraid or ZFS supporting OS, do an import command and boom, your entire filesystem is detected and live again. Only thing you need to do is map your iSCSI, CIFS or SMB shares.

Or even further, trashing your ESXi install, installing a linux version or ZFS system instead and doing the same, simply remounting that what is on the disks you previously had RAW mapped.

I love Linux SoftRAID and ZFS style raid, I prefer it over hardware raid for home setups, and not only because it is a ton cheaper. You can yank your disks out of a system, put them in another one with completely different hardware and simply remount (with ZFS) or in case of linux softraid, reassemble the raid array (although often OS's like Gentoo will autoassemble).

With hardware raid, there's still too many horror stories about raid controllers dying and the data on the raid controller being goners or broken, especially if you don't have access to the exact same type of raid controller to do a restore with that.