Home SAN fibre system

Hi all a quick update.

Had a very productive weekend. Went to my local PC repair shop where they discovered what was wrong with the motherboard: apparently my GPU was not supported as it was an 8 bus so I bought a fanless Nvidia 210.

Now I have EXRi 5.0 set up with PCI passthough of my RAID controller and Mellanox card :D

My VMs atm are:
Windows Server Essentials 2012 as my DC
FreeNAS running my ISCSI share

The next plan is to figure out how to make use of my infiniband card as FreeNAS does not support this method. Also I need to get a dual Intel NIC so I can setup PFSense and Untangle.
 
Search for a E1G42ET as it will do the job and is around 130.00. Note the ESXi management network can use a shared network port as long as the chipset is ESXi supported. Having a dedicated port is really overkill as the traffic is minimal. Put your management network and your DC on vSwitch 3. Unless it is not supported, there is not much reason to do IO passthough on the network now. ESXi 4.1 used to have quite a bit of overhead on the networking but now with ESXi 5.1 you can easily get good speed without passthrough and you will get better use out of it.

RB
 
RimBlock said:
Search for a E1G42ET as it will do the job and is around 130.00. Note the ESXi management network can use a shared network port as long as the chipset is ESXi supported. Having a dedicated port is really overkill as the traffic is minimal. Put your management network and your DC on vSwitch 3. Unless it is not supported, there is not much reason to do IO passthough on the network now. ESXi 4.1 used to have quite a bit of overhead on the networking but now with ESXi 5.1 you can easily get good speed without passthrough and you will get better use out of it.

RB
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice. I think I will still need a 4 port NIC as 1 will be used for management/DC, 1 to connect to the Untangle appliance and 1 for the DMZ.

An updated diagram:
<img src="http://www.gliffy.com/pubdoc/4037104/M.png"/>

M.png
 
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Sorta looks good but a couple of questions and clarifications....

Why not have untangle as a VM and have the networking between Untangle as virtual (i.e. no physical NICs needed) ?. Presumably Untangle will be set to do the routing for you so you can segregate the two subnets.

Why not just use 192.168.1.XXX for internal DMZ and 192.168.2.XXX for internal private. The way the diagram is set, the private IP is 192.168.48.XXX but the DC is on the 10.0.0.XXX subnet with no router inbetween.

I would suggest (Infiniband connection excluded from diagram) ....

vSphere.jpg


RB
 
Thanks for your advice. I'm just thinking about expandability. In the future I'd like to have a separate 1U server for Untangle (only because it'll look cool in my rack lol!). I think for now your layout is good since I found a E1G42ET for £50.

How did you make the diagram by the way?
 
Yeah I know what you mean and having a 42U rack at home I can hardly be expected to talk you out of it :D.

Maybe you can go for the layout above and then you have room to grow outwards at a later point ;).

I may have a look at Untangle myself as I have just got a load of D2500CC dual lan Atom boards in just waiting for a job :). Of course I will put then in a 1Us as they look cool :D, well maybe one anyway.:)

RB
 
Just thought I'd give you an update.

This server had been working great since last Xmas. I have set up FreeNAS with the 4x2TB drives and Windows Server Essentials 2012 as my DC. Speeds arent great over a 1Gb ethernet but bearable. I also have Untangle running and Symantec SBS on all my clients.

Not sure if I should try to team up a dual Intel NIC to get better speeds?
 
GodAtum said:
Just thought I'd give you an update.

This server had been working great since last Xmas. I have set up FreeNAS with the 4x2TB drives and Windows Server Essentials 2012 as my DC. Speeds arent great over a 1Gb ethernet but bearable. I also have Untangle running and Symantec SBS on all my clients.

Not sure if I should try to team up a dual Intel NIC to get better speeds?
Click to expand...

I believe having dual NIC's will only help if you are downloading data from the server to two different locations. It doesn't split the data as such
 
If you Team-NIC them into a 2 GB link it will help with throughput which is what I have done at home BUT your switch must support the IEEE 802.3ad for link aggregation :)
 
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