So I actually wrote most of this a very long time ago when I first got the xeon powered server at the end of 2016.
After looking for a new server for awhile, something with a little more power to run a virtualized home lab and to be able to use the old one as a Pfsense router as my home router was not cutting it lately as the web interface decided it wanted to keep crashing for no particular reason which was rather annoying when trying to forward a port but having to kill the internet and restart the router. It had been a good home router up until this point so its going to be relegated to being a wifi access point.
So looking into the different hyper visors, with Xen, KVM and Xen server being the options and playing with Xen and KVM, I ended up going with KVM as my choice.
The important bits firstly.
The specs of the main server:
- 2x Xeon E5-2670
- 32 GB ECC ram
- 4 port Intel gigabit network card
- 2x 256 GB solid state drives
The specs of the nas:
- 4 core cpu, some Intel thing with a hardware bug
- 16 GB ram
- 2x 3 TB Western Digital red disks
- 2x 4 TB Seagate iron wolf disks
The specs of the pfsense box:
- 4 core cpu, ASRock fan less 4 core celeron
- 4 GB ram
- 1 x 120gb ssd
- http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/J3455B-ITX/
Frankenstein main server
The main server is a bit of a frankenstein with its water cooling being after market and attached to the top of the case as I bought the case with the motherboard and power supply only and bought the cpus and ram separate. There is not a huge amount of room to mount in hard disks as the machine is originally a work station so the dvd rom was removed and with a little double sided tape the hard drives mounted in there. (Update) The tape and disks have been removed from the main server and moved to the nas.
Testing all those threads, 32 all on 100% load using the stress tool running for a quick stability/temp check.
The NAS
Zfs was chosen as the storage driver of choice with it’s advanced features and stability/maturity over Btrfs, when Btrfs is a little more mature I think It will out do Zfs mainly based on the fact it can come integrated to the Linux distros with its compatible licence, but for the mean time Zfs with mirrored Zpools is what is going to be powering the underlying storage
Pfsense box
Just another small low power fan less cpu, nothing all that exciting however way more powerful than the rubbish that you get from your ISP and couple this with some unifi access points and its a solid setup
