Selfhosted

39987 readers

641 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

What is a good multirole server setup for a racked server? (self.selfhosted)

submitted 8 months ago by erev to c/selfhosted

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge R730 at a killer price, and intend it to be the cornerstone of my home lab. I plan to use it as both a NAS and a container server so I can set up whatever I want with it. I'm a bit unsure of what a good setup here looks like, so I'm hoping for a bit of guidance.

As my R730 has 16 drive bays, I intend for 10 of those to be high capacity HDDs for the NAS with the remaining spots for SSDs for the containers. The R730 will also have a PERC H730 RAID controller. I want a full featured NAS solution (although I am open to more lightweight solutions) so my go to thought is TrueNAS. My plan was to install Proxmox and run TrueNAS on top of it, but I am unsure if this is the best method. Does anyone have any insight on how well this works or if there's a cleaner solution?

Addendum: Anyone have any recommendations for RAID setups? I currently have 4x900 GB 10k SAS Dell Enterprise drives but I intend to bump that up to 10x900 GB over time. I'd like to be able to add these without much hassle, but I'm unsure what to go with. It seems that ZFS can handle it well alone, but I don't want to have gotten the good raid controller for nothing so I'm wondering if using ZFS with the RAID controller in HBA mode will be more worth it than a dedicated RAID setup. And if I'm using a RAID setup, should I go RAID or unRAID? If I go RAID, is RAID 01, 10, or 60 a better option here? Based on my research, it sounds like I'll need a lot more drives for a proper RAID setup and it'll be less flexible, but I would like some second opinions.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I’m not sure why, but it seems like TrueNAS in a VM is not recommended (I saw a thread on their forum)… I also wanted the ability to add more drives later on, so I’ve gone with UnRAID and even though it’s only been a few weeks, it seems pretty functional and I’m glad I paid the licensing fee. I am trying to do Proxmox and OPNsense on one of those fanless N305 boxes and am getting very confused!

[–] flying_mechanic 4 points 8 months ago

Either trueNAS or unraid work as a vm in Proxmox, but there's some caveats. You have to pass the whole hba/lsi pcie device to the vm so you can't split the backplane of the server.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I’m running this way on one of my servers. It’s fine if you pass the entire HBA over (make sure it’s in IT mode for Proxmox).

Alternatively you can map each drive over by disk-by-id mappings as I’m doing on this one. I haven’t dealt with a drive failure yet, but from what I read it’s just a little bit of a headache to re-add the drives later. “Not recommended”, but ok if you know what you’re doing.