Best way to organize drives in order to expand easily

[Teurce]

I have an R720XD running ESXi. I currently plan to use FreeNAS in order to organize my main array, which I will be expanding over time as my storage needs grow.

 

My objectives are:

 

Ability to retain as much usable capacity as possible (not mirroring every drive with another, for example)

Offers (at least) single drive redundancy

And most importantly, easily expandable in the future without the requirement to reformat the entire array and start over every time I add more storage.

 

It seems like the best solution to meet these needs would be unRAID, although at $60 starting price it's the difference between having another 5ish terabytes of storage or unRAID, so if it's possible to get a similar setup working with FreeNAS (with RAID Z whatever) while still maintaining the ability to expand without reformatting, I would much rather go with that. However, the main limitation of unRAID I saw is that you can only run it from a USB stick, so running it under ESXi is probably out of the question anyways.

 

My broader data layout / storage is currently planned to be this:

 

ESXi booting off a USB stick

Random drive flopping around to load FreeNAS onto, or a SD card / USB stick at the back for it.

H170P RAID controller flashed to IT mode passed through to FreeNAS

FreeNAS creates a RAID 1 of the two 300gb 15k. RPM 2.5 inch HDDs at the back to store all the VMs on. (FreeNAS config can easily be exported to XML so the FreeNAS drive failure isn't a big problem)

All VMs loaded onto the RAID 1 array, mounted over iSCSI or NFS to ESXi (Should be pretty fast because they are in the same machine after all, will do some speed testing)

VMs can access the main array over again an iSCSI or NFS array (such as Plex)

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

How about snapraid + mergerfs in linux? Basically the same as unraid, but diy. Or try btrfs in linux.

 

But id just put unraid on the hardware and forget exsi here, that would the the easiest to setup and manage.

[Teurce]

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

But id just put unraid on the hardware and forget exsi here, that would the the easiest to setup and manage.

I plan to use this as my general purpose box for everything though; so I would have to run ESXi in a VM and assign it a bunch of resources and stuff... would double hypervisors cause issues?

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, Teurce said:

I plan to use this as my general purpose box for everything though; so I would have to run ESXi in a VM and assign it a bunch of resources and stuff... would double hypervisors cause issues?

Why not just run windows on the host then? Makes hardware setup much easier, and you can use storage spaces to manage the drives.

[Teurce]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Why not just run windows on the host then? Makes hardware setup much easier, and you can use storage spaces to manage the drives.

Sorry what? Windows is not an effective hypervisor compared to licensed ESXi. I'm just looking for a storage management solution. Is creating a windows VM and then passing through the HBA and creating storage spaces an effective solution? It doesn't seem to have the feature set of FreeNAS with ACLs, easy configuration of iSCSI, not to mention security issues compared to FreeNAS.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, Teurce said:

Sorry what? Windows is not an effective hypervisor compared to licensed ESXi. I'm just looking for a storage management solution. Is creating a windows VM and then passing through the HBA and creating storage spaces an effective solution? It doesn't seem to have the feature set of FreeNAS with ACLs, easy configuration of iSCSI, not to mention security issues compared to FreeNAS.

Windows hyper-v is basically the same features wise. 

 

Windows can do iscsi, acls, and security is about the same is setup right.

 

Since yo uwant this to be a workstation, id just run windows as it will be much simpler, and you get all the full enterprise hypervisor features with hyper-v

[Teurce]

46 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Since you want this to be a workstation

This is my "everything" server that's sitting in my basement, it's not a workstation. I'm not looking for hypervisor suggestions - I got that all sorted out already.

 

Just looking for suggestions on a storage management solution that would provide easy expansion without reformatting the entire array. It seems like unRAID is my best bet, considering windows storage spaces got recommended as an alternative.

[Electronics Wizardy]

38 minutes ago, Teurce said:

This is my "everything" server that's sitting in my basement, it's not a workstation. I'm not looking for hypervisor suggestions - I got that all sorted out already.

 

Just looking for suggestions on a storage management solution that would provide easy expansion without reformatting the entire array. It seems like unRAID is my best bet, considering windows storage spaces got recommended as an alternative.

OOPs got that confused then.

 

Id probably jsut fire up a vm with linux and use mergerfs + snapraid or btrfs or windows and storage spaces. Both will work well here.

 

Why not play with these options in a vm and test them?