Setting up home lab - need input

[Outlaw85]

Looking for the best and/or most efficient approach. Sorry if this gets lengthy.

--End Goal---
Media share to household
Storage share to VMs
Several VMs running
pfsense
vpn

--Current Setup---
1- Cisco Catalyst 2948G-GE-TX (standard config)
1- WinServer running game and chat servers (Eventually this will P2V)
3- Hosts
--1 2xE5504 28GB RAM (has storage)
---Used as management host only. Currently has vCenter Server and FreeNas.
--2 2xE5520 64GB RAM (no storage)
---Used for VMs.


Ultimately I'd like to wire up the house. Even with the number of jacks I would consider doing, I'd only be about 12-20ports. Having the storage go through the switch would be fine from port usage but if the extra hop can be removed, I'd like to bypass the switch alltogether.

I have 4x 4port Gbit cards (brand unk atm) I was thinking I could plug into the hosts and direct connect for storage. Would this be feasible/ideal? Or would I need to go through the switch? (2 cards in the mgmt host with 1 set going to each 4x1gb card in the hosts. (Hopefully that makes sense). Right now I have 1x1GB from each of the hosts.

I do also have a brocade capable of 2GB (SFP) per port and thinking of trying to incorporate it as the dedicated storage.. The more I think about it, it may be more work than it's worth?


For the media/storage share. I've been going back and forth on having them separate or merged.
-Merged- Have all media disks added to freenas as avaialble storage to the cluster. Have a Media VM with all the necessary storage attached.
-Separate- FreeNas would only present storage to the VMs. A separate physical would present the media with attached storage.
For either scenario, I still need to get additional drives for backups. I currently do not have the media drives powered on or even in a server (unless needed) to lessen chance of failure until then.


I know in a previous thread I had, it was brought up to do local storage in the hosts and then maybe mirror them. I would like to do this, however,it would require me to purchase all the disks as the hosts only support (upto 8) 2.5" drives and I only have (will be getting for free) 3.5" drives.

VM/Cluster usage- will have about 3TB (1TB disks).
Media usage- Will have about 6TB (2TB disks).


Right now, my setup is a huge mess and I will be reorganizing it and wiping it clean once I get the TB disks.


Any help/input is appreciated.
Thanks,
Outlaw

 

[Outlaw85]

Looks like the fiber part was discussed earlier in this thread Fiber Channel SAN. I didn't see if there was a good replacement to FreeNAS since it appears to not play nice with fiber. Any recommendations? I want it to be stable and don't want to spend much if any money, it doesn't necessarily need to be setup like an enterprise or anything. I'm more focused on learning vcenter and virtualization. The proper supporting infra learning I can get at work.