SuperMicro Build

[NobodyPostedHere]

I sometimes come across free or cheap electronics, and then I proceed to spend money on implementing them with absurd fervor.  So I was looking through some old equipment and checking the benchmarks for their procs and I found a few that had pretty good scores.  I was given 6 E5-2660 Xeon processors, and this kickstarted my search for how to use them.  

 

Step 1: The Board

Without putting too much thought into it, I found a board that would fit the processors with an astonishing amount of RAM slots.  The X9DR3-LN4F+ seemed like a good choice at first.  (I thought it was an EATX mobo.) I figured I would just slap some RAM in it and throw it in a case with a power supply and be off to the races.  Too good to be true.  I found 128 GB DDR3 1066 MHz (8x16GB) of Samsung memory, and based on what I have read about how this memory works on this board, I am right around the sweet spot for the speed/quantity ratio.  I also got a PCI-E adapter for a 250 GB NVME drive along with a 4 TB full size HDD.  I am going to see if I can boot through the PCI-E, but I am not sure if that will work.

 

Step 2: The Case

After fiddling with an ATX and EATX case, and realizing I was not going to get full use out of the board without some serious rigging, I bit the bullet and went for the CSE-745TQ-R920B.  I am still waiting on the case to be delivered, so I am still working on planning the setup.

 

Step 3: 8xSAS Backplane

Realizing that there was going to be some empty slots to fill in the front of the case, I grabbed two of the connectors from SuperMicro's site along with 10 3TB SAS drives.  (2 for hot swapping if needed.) It looks like you can work the storage through the BIOS.  I don't have much experience with this, but after doing some research I found that an 8x3TB RAID 6 setup would allow for the use of 18TB with up to 2 drive failures at a time.

 

Step 4: Power

I am not sure what to say about this case, but it is a 4U tower case.  (4u when laid on its side) The case was the most expensive thing, and I think that this is because of the 2 920 watt gold standard 90% efficiency power supplies.  It will be interesting to see what the actual power draw is as I want to place it next to my networking equipment.

 

Considerations:

I have a handful of NUC's that are capped out with memory/proc/storage and I have been running Xenserver (Now Citrix Hypervisor) on one of these for the last 9 months.  I think I want to run Server 2016 on this new setup so I can work with some Hyper-V and VMware.  I am in a master's program right now studying cybersecurity and I think that being able to spin up vm's to test/practice the latest exploits will help to hone my admin/ethical hacking skills.  But with the amount of resources available on this server, I can't justify not also using it for a NAS as well.  I know the Server 2016 isn't going to be on the compatibility list, so I might have to revert to running bare metal Citrix Hypervisor to get the ball rolling.

 

If anyone has some tips for setting up RAID6, implementing Citrix Hypervisor (CentOS?), or what type of networking I should be doing so I can manage the iPMI/BMC features without breaking the bank that would be great.  Also if you have any advice on the load I can look forward to with the redundant power supply that would help too.