Home lab, NAS, www on one machine, VMWare and Microserver Gen8 - considerations,help

Q

qhash

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 25, 2011
Messages
110
hi guys,

I am planning to finally build my own home lab system. As I live in the flat, have no basement I could place the system, it has to be quiet. Due to that fact I have chosen Gen8 Microserver from HP as a HW platform.


Right now I have 1 x Microserver 8GBram (4x3,5" bays, 1x2,5", Celeron 1610T, 2 x Seagate SV35 1TB, 1 x WD RED 3TB ), 1 x Xeon E3-1220v2.

I have read a lot, used some basic ESXi configurations and did some basic NAS systems in the past, but when advanced things are considered I have little experience and lately less and less time. That is why I have started this thread to ask the community to help me not to make a mistake buying wrong stuff or bulding a solution that I will have to back up on seperate drive and redo again.

VMware approach has two reasons - fan issue of Gen8 and DSM and my need of having additional 2 low duty servers.

A
My base idea for small home lab is to:
0. replace CPU for XEON, option, as I do now want noise and power consumption to go up
1. buy additional WD RED 3TB
2. buy Intel 520 SSD 240GB
3. run ESXi 5.5 from usb/sd
4. store VMs on SSD
5. do RAID-1s from 2x1TB and 2x3TB
6. VM #1 DSM/xpenology7. map 3TB RAID1 using Raw Device Mapping ( in case anything happens, a can always move those disks to virtual or physical DSM env. and recover data)
7. backup VMs and other important data on 2x1TB RAID


B
As I would like to learn more about iSCSI, HA and other advanced features, I wonder if buying another Gen8 (there is promo 350usd, 2020T,4gb RAM, 2 x 1TB NL SATA) and going to:

1. leave 2 x 3TB, install Xeon in 1st gen8 as VMware host and RDM mapped NAS as VM #1
2. put 4 x 1TB to 2nd gen8 and do ZFS RAIDZ network iSCSI storage for other VMs, backups

Questions are:
is A a good way to have home NAS with some options for more environments? what would you change?
is B a viable approach for learning and having home server at the same time? what can done better? changed? I do not mind buing some stuff in order to have some perfect home lab ;)
 
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Don't have info to help you but I would love to see specifics of how you end up doing this. It sounds very similar to what I would like to do as well.
 
You could do so much better than those Microservers, depending on what you want to do, they are so limited.

Personally, if were to build something quiet and powerful it would be the following:

Mini-itx case (Yeah..I said ITX)
ASRock E3C224D4I-14S - 4 x DDR3 ECC DIMM Slots & Onboard LSI SAS Controller
Intel 1220V3
Up to 64GB DDR3 ECC RAM
Corsair Obsidian 250D
Corsair Value Power Supply
Corsair H60 Water Cooler

Quiet, powerfull, small footprint...some expansion and supported VMware Hardware RAID onboard.
 
If you want super low power, super low heat, and very small foot print for a home lab to learn all that is VMware, check out my Intel NUC project. I have a three Node VSAN cluster running on three Intel NUCs. It pulls 50 watts, zero heat, zero noise and I can run some massive VMs (massive in home lab terms) with no issues.

As of this post, I have two database servers, a Webserver, a fileserver, a syslog server, and two Virtual Desktop PCs running on a single NUC in my VSAN cluster. The desktops respond instantly and run great for what the kids need.

Running VDI for the kids and wife is magical because I destroy the VM every evening. Infected PCs and hijacked browsers are solved with a reboot!

Check out my blog if you want to learn more about my NUC build.
http://vmnick0.me

Quick sample of the rack:
vsanlegoV2-1-225x300.jpg


Nicholas Farmer
@vmnick0
 
Vader said:
You could do so much better than those Microservers, depending on what you want to do, they are so limited.

Personally, if were to build something quiet and powerful it would be the following:

Mini-itx case (Yeah..I said ITX)
ASRock E3C224D4I-14S - 4 x DDR3 ECC DIMM Slots & Onboard LSI SAS Controller
Intel 1220V3
Up to 64GB DDR3 ECC RAM
Corsair Obsidian 250D
Corsair Value Power Supply
Corsair H60 Water Cooler

Quiet, powerfull, small footprint...some expansion and supported VMware Hardware RAID onboard.
Click to expand...

How are you getting up to 64 GB of memory with UDIMMs?
 
Typo...my mistake, 32GB..still an awesome platform for the size....got this and the Avaton platform mixed up
 
wow, thanks for your asnwers and discussion. i have checked my thread two days back, there was no reply, my browser must have not refreshed that page, I thought no one is willing to write here.

@Vader
I bought that Microserver becouse it was extremly cheap and had an option to replace CPU for 1220v2 which I also have.
ASRock motherboard you mentioned, however, seems pretty nice, especially that RAID controller. I could use a configution of Microserver as iSCSI storage and a machine of yours as VMware host, right?

@nicholasfarmer
how much storage space you get in your setup? what is the fault tollerance for that amount of space? 1 or 2 NUCs? what you built seems as I really great system
 
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ASRock motherboard you mentioned, however, seems pretty nice, especially that RAID controller. I could use build Microserver as iSCSI storage and machine of yours as VMware host, right?
Click to expand...

Absolutely.
 
Hmm, I looked a little bit more into some standalone VMWare HW platform solutions (I would sell Microserver) but most of the ITX cases like obsidian only have 2 drive bays. How would you solve that problem in the inital configuration you proposed as a replacement of Gen8 microserver?
 
@nicholasfarmer
Can NUC vSAN approach deliver data resiliency for 1 VM that will be home NAS along with all the learning options ?
 
qhash said:
@nicholasfarmer
Can NUC vSAN approach deliver data resiliency for 1 VM that will be home NAS along with all the learning options ?
Click to expand...

I don't see why not. The other nodes would pick up the load.
 
i am not so well familiar with vsan technology. How the data resiliency is maintained compared to RAID?
 
The more you try to put on one system the more complicated it is. I'm a HP microserver fan. I'd put the storage on a separate system that you can leave on all of the time and not be so dependent on the vmware file system type. That could be a NAS device or another MicroServer.
 
My initial approach was the one you are proposing - one microserver with celeron for just plain iSCSI datastorage and the second one with Xeon for VMs. Simple = better. Yeah, I know that. It is just becausee I need to learn more about VMWare. vSAN seems really interesting approach to virtualization environment, that is why i wanted to know about data resiliency implementation. If a have one HDD and one SSD, how better it will be having two HDDs (RAID1) and SSD? And more.
 
wow, so no controller-based RAID? thanks for the link. Its kinda like ZFS then :)
 
nicholasfarmer said:
If you want super low power, super low heat, and very small foot print for a home lab to learn all that is VMware, check out my Intel NUC project. I have a three Node VSAN cluster running on three Intel NUCs. It pulls 50 watts, zero heat, zero noise and I can run some massive VMs (massive in home lab terms) with no issues.

As of this post, I have two database servers, a Webserver, a fileserver, a syslog server, and two Virtual Desktop PCs running on a single NUC in my VSAN cluster. The desktops respond instantly and run great for what the kids need.

Running VDI for the kids and wife is magical because I destroy the VM every evening. Infected PCs and hijacked browsers are solved with a reboot!

Check out my blog if you want to learn more about my NUC build.
http://vmnick0.me

Quick sample of the rack:
vsanlegoV2-1-225x300.jpg


Nicholas Farmer
@vmnick0
Click to expand...

Damn! Sick looking
 
You really don't need that much network disk performance unless you add something faster than a 1 GB ethernet nic. I wouldn't go ZFS simply due to how complicated it is to do right. Vmware gives you lots of choices for remote file systems. It doesn't matter that much if you are learning what type. You'd have more flexibility if you were about to set it up multiple ways for your learning and reinstall at will. One way to do that is to run VMs that expose the other file system types. All you'd need to have iSCSI available is bring up a VM that has that as a service.

I hope my comments aren't too confusing. :)
 
To answer the quick question about the NUC setup, storage space, and data resiliency:

I'm using three Intel NUCs because three is the minimum needed for a real VSAN cluster. You can have Lots more if you like. The way VSAN works is it creates copies of the data on other systems. Its like an endless vmotion or VM copy to another system that will take over when the main system (running the VM) fails.

My setup has a 120GB SSD and 2TB spinner. So, in theory, I have between 2TB and 4TB of usable space. It really depends on how many copies of the VMs I have configured. If I create a VM that has 50GB used, I select I want two copies in addition to the primary system, then it would use 150GB. You can then play with some thin provision and unmap settings etc to reduce the "used" space. 2TB is the largest 2.5" drive I could find. You can bump the SSD to 512GB but you may not find it being used as much as you like. If you need a lot of space you could scale out and get six NUCs with 2TB drives. With only one additional VM copy you could jump to 7-10TB usable.

I went this method because I can run some basic VMs, move them around all the time, and it only uses 30 Watts in the garage. This winter we had the power drop a few times because of high winds. My VSAN cluster stayed online for an hour from UPS power until the power came back up. Try buying a UPS for three HP Servers that will last an hour or more.

Another idea, if you need more power:
You can always have a very powerful server as the first node in your VSAN cluster. Then, if something happens, you can have the powerful server migrate the VMs to the smaller NUCs and power itself down to conserve UPS power.

The main idea to use VSAN is to remove the need for "remote" storage. The VMs read from their local storage and then send writes to remote hosts. Very fast reads, some what fast writes. The worst performance issue today is waiting for your "remote" storage system to respond. If all you want to do is open a notepad txt file and your "NAS" is running super slow, its going to take forever. Keep read IO local in cache, send writes over the wire as a "backup". Its like built-in SAN replication.

Let me know if you have any more questions.
You can also ping me on twitter @vmnick0

Nicholas Farmer
 
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Hi Nicholas,

Are you running this VSAN cluster on the free ESXi license?

This article list a passthru RAID controller as a requirement for VSAN. Do your NUCs have that?

John
 
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