Need storage advice for home all-in-one server

xuc318

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Mar 2, 2013
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I found this forum a few days ago when I was researching for my next build. It has been a tremendous help to me in choosing hardware and software. I have decided to build a all-in-one using the following parts,

Case: Fractal Design Define R4
CPU: XEON E3-1245V2
Motherboard: Supermicro X9SAE-V-O
Memory: Hynix DDR3-1600 4x8GB ECC
SSD: Samsung 840 Pro Series 256GB x2
Hard drive: Seagate Constellation ES 2TB x2 (will purchase 3 or 4 more 2TB Sata drives)
PSU:SeaSonic X750 Gold 750W ATX12V
HBA: IBM M1015

I will run about 6-7 VMs on this ESXi host,

1. a Win7 machine for web browsing, MS office, photo processing
2. a Win7 HTPC media server to store ripped bluerays, music, etc. about 2-3 TB. I am planning to add a cable tuner later to make it a Window Media Center server, and use Xbox or Ceton echo to replace my cable boxes.
3. a Windows 2012 server to play around.
4. 2-3 Linux VMs to install Oracle RAC database and Oracle Application servers.
5. an OI/napp-it SAN/NAS server for storage.

Since I am all new to ESX and zfs, I would like to have some advices from experts here on how to configure the drives to have the balance between performance and reliability.

This is what I am planning to,

Have two ZFS pools, one VM pool of the two Samsung SSDs in mirror 1 for all the VMs and Oracle's redo logs and temp tablespace. I figure 256GB should be big enough for all the OS installs? The other pool will be the 6x2TB as RAIDZ1 or RAIZ2 for data storage. I probably need 1TB as iSCSI targets for the Oracle database. Rest of it will be data storage for Windows and backup.

Will there be a performance problem with the RAIDZ pool for my database because it does a lot of random IOs, do I need to add another SSD for L2ARC and ZIL?

I plan to put ESXi and OI on a SATA 100GB drive from my old computer, will it be ok?

Thanks in advance.
 
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Will there be a performance problem with the RAIDZ pool for my database because it does a lot of random IOs, do I need to add another SSD for L2ARC and ZIL?
Well it's hard to say. I would think that a database on your home server (is this database just for fun?) will be able to manage perfectly fine with RAID-Z or Z2 and no cache.
If you were running some sort of mission-critical, performance intensive database for a Wall Street bank then I would probably go for a more performance orientated setup, like using a pool of mirrors. But that would cost more and use more drives.
In your case you need the capacity for storing all your media, so the more space-efficient setup seems sensible, unless you want to buy more drives to make more mirrors to get the equivalent capacity.

I plan to put ESXi and OI on a SATA 100GB drive from my old computer, will it be ok?

Thanks in advance.
Again, in most cases it will be "OK". I run OI on my little home NAS from a single old 250GB HDD. If you have the money and you want to go for a more resilient setup then you might consider buying 2 new drives and mirroring them.
 
If it were me...as an all in one I'd forget iscsi, just go straight NFS with sync disabled. Get a decent UPS on it and don't worry about it. That will probably eliminate any need for ZIL. Then depending on how much ram you leave dedicated to the OI VM and how read heavy your actual workload is, may also make L2 cache unnecessary. In any case you should start WITHOUT any ZIL or L2 but simply add them later if/when you determine that you have the need.
 
Thanks for your advices.

Concentric,
Yes, the database is only for me to get familiar with Oracle new features. On one of my test server at work I had an Oracle database running on a VM. It was very slow because the whole thing was on one SATA drive. I am going to have 4+2 RAIZ2 so hopefully I have decent performance this time around.

Silenus,
Oracle RAC needs shared storage to store data. It can run files system on NFS but it would be faster using raw device using ASM. Therefore I am considering iscsi. For my media server, I will use NFS. I will try without ZIL and see how it performs.

I am in the process of putting the hardware together this week. Will report back on the progress.
 
I plan to put ESXi and OI on a SATA 100GB drive from my old computer, will it be ok?

Your setup is similar to mine:

ESXi AIO: E3-1240 V2 | Supermicro X9SCM-F | 16 GB Kingston ECC | M1015 | 2 x ST3000DM001 | 6 x HD204UI | Fractal Design Define XL | TBS 6280 Dual DVB-T2

I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong but I don't think you can install ESXi and have a datastore on the same HDD. Maybe install ESXi on a USB stick? That is what I have done and it works great. Saves a HDD slot for main storage :)
 
Your setup is similar to mine:

ESXi AIO: E3-1240 V2 | Supermicro X9SCM-F | 16 GB Kingston ECC | M1015 | 2 x ST3000DM001 | 6 x HD204UI | Fractal Design Define XL | TBS 6280 Dual DVB-T2

I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong but I don't think you can install ESXi and have a datastore on the same HDD. Maybe install ESXi on a USB stick? That is what I have done and it works great. Saves a HDD slot for main storage :)

I believe you can put ESXI and a data store on thee same disk. I am following Gea's all-in-one document and installed OminOs. I plan to put another old HDD to mirror the local disk.

Just curious, you have 3 machines, what do you use your AIO for? I noticed you have two TV tuners on the AIO.
 
I believe you can put ESXI and a data store on thee same disk. I am following Gea's all-in-one document and installed OminOs. I plan to put another old HDD to mirror the local disk.

Just curious, you have 3 machines, what do you use your AIO for? I noticed you have two TV tuners on the AIO.

Yeah, I think I was wrong. I was aware of some scenarios. Maybe it is only USB datastores that are not allowed which is why mine did not allow it.

AIO at the moment has:


  • PVR VM: Single card but dual TV tuner passed through. Running tvheadend which my XBMC HTPC connects to.

  • Storage VM. M1015 passed through.

  • Internal web server.

  • Various development VM's.
I'm looking at expanding my storage soon and possibly using ZFS for my DVD/BR collection.
 
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