Just bought myself a second hand rack for cheap locally and looking into building myself an ESXi + ZFS file server... Need a bit of confirmation before I pull the trigger on this hardware. Will be using it to store my large collection of movies/photos/websites/documents and some work backups off-site. ZFS is attractive to me because of the non-corruption of data, security, snapshots, and compression options. (despite this, I have a secondary backup system already for important files), I will also be virtualizing a web server and a domain server / any other projects I come up with.
Core Hardware:
Chassis: Norco 4020 (20 hot swap drive bays)
Mobo: Supermicro MBD-X9SCL+-F
Memory: 2 x Kingston 8GB DDR3 ECC Registered KVR1333D3D4R9S/8G
CPU: Core i5-2400
Will be running ESXi off of usb thumb drive, and virtualizing openindiana on thumbdrive to run large filesystem.
Current Storage Plans:
I plan to run a 10 x 2TB RAIDZ2 initially, which should give me 2 parity drives and 8 data drives. Using the striping rule, 128 zfs stripe size/8 data drives = 16 So I should be good, I don't mind only one vdev starting out since I wont need more than sata speed normally as I will mostly be interfacing over gigabit.
Drives:10x2TB
Controller: Intel M1015 8 port controller, 2 onboard ports.
So I plan to run the 10 drives using both the m1015 and 2 onboard motherboard ports, Since ZFS interfaces with each drive singly, this shouldn't be a problem right?
Future Expansion:
Going forward in the next year or so, I would like to max out the hot-swap bay capacity and expand another 10 drives by adding another vdev device with 3TB drives, I plan on adding another M1015 controller at that time and doing another vdev except with 3TB drives: 10 x 3TB RAIDZ2 vdev
I expect the additional vdev will improve performance of the pool when I get around to adding it.
should there be any problems expanding my pool by adding this second vdev device? even though one vdev is using 2TB and the other 3TB?
Other expansion possibilities include throwing an intel SSD or 2 into place as a zfs caching device to improve performance for the virtual machines.
So to wrap it up, these are my plans, giving me 16TB storage initially and a future expansion to 40TB later on when I add a new vdev. Are there any glaring problems with this strategy? Thanks for reviewing..
Core Hardware:
Chassis: Norco 4020 (20 hot swap drive bays)
Mobo: Supermicro MBD-X9SCL+-F
Memory: 2 x Kingston 8GB DDR3 ECC Registered KVR1333D3D4R9S/8G
CPU: Core i5-2400
Will be running ESXi off of usb thumb drive, and virtualizing openindiana on thumbdrive to run large filesystem.
Current Storage Plans:
I plan to run a 10 x 2TB RAIDZ2 initially, which should give me 2 parity drives and 8 data drives. Using the striping rule, 128 zfs stripe size/8 data drives = 16 So I should be good, I don't mind only one vdev starting out since I wont need more than sata speed normally as I will mostly be interfacing over gigabit.
Drives:10x2TB
Controller: Intel M1015 8 port controller, 2 onboard ports.
So I plan to run the 10 drives using both the m1015 and 2 onboard motherboard ports, Since ZFS interfaces with each drive singly, this shouldn't be a problem right?
Future Expansion:
Going forward in the next year or so, I would like to max out the hot-swap bay capacity and expand another 10 drives by adding another vdev device with 3TB drives, I plan on adding another M1015 controller at that time and doing another vdev except with 3TB drives: 10 x 3TB RAIDZ2 vdev
I expect the additional vdev will improve performance of the pool when I get around to adding it.
should there be any problems expanding my pool by adding this second vdev device? even though one vdev is using 2TB and the other 3TB?
Other expansion possibilities include throwing an intel SSD or 2 into place as a zfs caching device to improve performance for the virtual machines.
So to wrap it up, these are my plans, giving me 16TB storage initially and a future expansion to 40TB later on when I add a new vdev. Are there any glaring problems with this strategy? Thanks for reviewing..