unRaid Freenas-Windows server box

[markes12344]

So I'm wanting to unRaid a system to run Freenas and a Windows OS. 

 

Freenas
-Mostly all disks

-Plex

-BtSync

-Family and Close Friends Cloud

Windows

-Game Server 

--7 Days 2 Die

--MineCraft

-FaH when not in use

 

 

im looking at system specs to be around  thease (main calc components)

CPU- 2x- i7-5960X

MOBO- ASUS Z10PA-D8 ATX server board dual socket

Ram- 4x- Kingston Value Ram 16GB ECC

GPU- due to budget im only going to have my 560 580 n 770 to play with until future 

 

As for storage that is not needed in discussion, but the windows machine will have a 1tb SSD for OS and server files. 

 

Main reason why im posting is;
I need to know a good ball park to split the systems CPU performance.
what will be more CPU hungry, while I know freenas will be more RAM hungry, as the windows machine should be fine with only 16GB allocated to it, if not less.  

[Murphistic]

One serious problem with your build: two i7 CPUs will never work in a double socket board. You have to go for Xeons.

[SLAYR]

You need a xeon e5 2xxx v3/v4 to use the dual sockets on that board, dedicate two, or three cores to the plex sever/nas, and the rest to the game servers. 

 

With game servers if you don't have extremely good internet connection you might be better off renting a server, home internet connections aren't meant to handle the load of it.

 

You might also want to create a vm for each of the game servers.

[markes12344]

24 minutes ago, Murphistic said:

One serious problem with your build: two i7 CPUs will never work in a double socket board. You have to go for Xeons.

well this puts a downer on my plans... guess i gatta get saving abit more, was ready to start buying parts. hopefully a good quality ebay listing comes around.

[markes12344]

11 minutes ago, SLAYR said:

You need a xeon e5 2xxx v3/v4 to use the dual sockets on that board, dedicate two, or three cores to the plex sever/nas, and the rest to the game servers. 

 

With game servers if you don't have extremely good internet connection you might be better off renting a server, home internet connections aren't meant to handle the load of it.

 

You might also want to create a vm for each of the game servers.

The game server will mainly only be accessed by myself and friends. So typically only one game server at a time, but that is a good point if i was to host server for randoms and multi games at same time. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

47 minutes ago, markes12344 said:

well this puts a downer on my plans... guess i gatta get saving abit more, was ready to start buying parts. hopefully a good quality ebay listing comes around.

Id look at a used dell r710. There about 250 used on ebay and can hold dual 6 cores on 1366 and upto 288gb of ram

 

Then id run xen server on it. Its better than unraid and free.

 

Id Then dont run a freenas vm, no reason to. 

 

Most games don't need a ton of cpu power, so dual 8 cores is overkill. Also a 1tb ssd is overkill. If you want a file server, add a few drives.

 

 

[ARikozuM]

11 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id look at a used dell r710. There about 250 used on ebay and can hold dual 6 cores on 1366 and upto 288gb of ram

 

Then id run xen server on it. Its better than unraid and free.

 

Id Then dont run a freenas vm, no reason to. 

 

Most games don't need a ton of cpu power, so dual 8 cores is overkill. Also a 1tb ssd is overkill. If you want a file server, add a few drives.

 

 

Agreed on most counts except UnRAID (fight me skrub).

 

Also, why would you want to VM FreeNAS when you're building a server? 5960X for a single CPU server might be good but a serious waste of resources when any Xeon would serve the role much more elegantly.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

Agreed on most counts except UnRAID (fight me skrub).

Why use unriad as a virt host?

 

No commerical support

 

No clustering

 

No network storage

 

No fiberchannel

 

No vgpu

 

No free version

 

 

[ARikozuM]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Why use unriad as a virt host?

 

No commerical support - I'm assuming you mean on-site, so no.

No clustering - Why would a single household want more than one server or machine in tandem?

No network storage - It can be used as a NAS

No fiberchannel - No idea if it does.

No vgpu - GPU passthrough.

No free version - $50 for a Basic license that carries over multiple upgrades.

I'm not too sure about the fiber channel, but it does support dual and quad gigabit NIC's which is how I have mine.

[Electronics Wizardy]

9 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

I'm not too sure about the fiber channel, but it does support dual and quad gigabit NIC's which is how I have mine.

Unraid works fine for one system.

 

But if you want a deticaed vm host(unraid focues on storage)

 

Or a cluster so you can live migrate systems or have HA

 

Use something else.

[markes12344]

freenas on a VM because i wanted to just build one rig, but guess I may as well redesign a lot and make two systems one for the Nas n one for the Game Server/ in the future with better cards be my video edit/ stream box., so ya that's also why i kinda wanna stick to a dual CPU. 

incoming/outgoing network isn't in question. 

Im looking at the Dell r710's n just to keep things simple the one i would be interested in is $250CDN plus ill need raid cards to handle the 8 drive limitation, plus no GPU capability of the rack. So I may just have to head back to my specs with the change of waiting for xeon chips.

I have future plans i want to upgrade to, so i ask, Why could i not just 4core my Plex/Freenas 2-3 for it to be efficient, n one extra for a possible future plugin. than the remainder of cores can work with the GPUs i end up with in there to game host, n provide the capabilities i wan't to archive in distant future. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

10 hours ago, markes12344 said:

freenas on a VM because i wanted to just build one rig, but guess I may as well redesign a lot and make two systems one for the Nas n one for the Game Server/ in the future with better cards be my video edit/ stream box., so ya that's also why i kinda wanna stick to a dual CPU. 

incoming/outgoing network isn't in question. 

Im looking at the Dell r710's n just to keep things simple the one i would be interested in is $250CDN plus ill need raid cards to handle the 8 drive limitation, plus no GPU capability of the rack. So I may just have to head back to my specs with the change of waiting for xeon chips.

I have future plans i want to upgrade to, so i ask, Why could i not just 4core my Plex/Freenas 2-3 for it to be efficient, n one extra for a possible future plugin. than the remainder of cores can work with the GPUs i end up with in there to game host, n provide the capabilities i wan't to archive in distant future. 

Your running unraid, a nas OS, no reason to run a nas os in a vm.

 

Normally with free nas you should passthrough a hba to a vm with pcie passthrough, or just get a nas/san

 

The 710's have raid cards built in. Also if you want gpu's look at the tower servers like the t610 and the t410. or a newer dell r720. For your use you don't seem to need a gpu as game servers don't use gpu's at all.

 

You can share cores with vm's Id give them all at least 2 cores and se how it goes.

[leadeater]

Yep if going with unRAID then FreeNAS is pointless. Don't virtualize a NAS OS on a NAS OS, this isn't the movie Inception .

 

Anyway yes save yourself a ton of money and buy a used server off ebay, will actually be more reliable than something you could build new from generic parts.

[NelizMastr]

Honestly, just grab VMWare ESXi 6.0 (U2) and run everything on there. It doesn't have any of UnRAID's drive limitations and supports everything you want it to do. From Update 2 onwards, you have both a web GUI (more features) and a desktop client available for management. On 6.0 vanilla, just a desktop client.

Once ESXi is running, you can create a FreeNAS VM and the Windows box for game servers and be done with it

 

It'll run beautifully on a used dual socket 1366 server or better.

 

Oh, and did I tell you that ESXi is free? Yes. A FREE bare metal hypervisor that's not microshafted. Win win.

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

From Update 2 onwards, you have both a web GUI (more features) and a desktop client available for management.

Yea U2 Web GUI is very nice, LONG ASS time coming though haha.

[NelizMastr]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Yea U2 Web GUI is very nice, LONG ASS time coming though haha.

Yeah, it's been in vCenter since 5.1. I guess they didn't feel the need until ESXi became free, since the average consumer can't afford to shed a few organs for vCenter.

[leadeater]

Just now, NelizMastr said:

Yeah, it's been in vCenter since 5.1. I guess they didn't feel the need until ESXi became free, since the average consumer can't afford to shed a few organs for vCenter.

Well it's more related to when they released hardware version 10 virtual machines which initially could only be managed by the new web management interface, only available at the time with vCenter. People initially got caught out by this who upgraded existing VMs to V10 and could no longer manage them at all if they did not have vCenter.

 

VMware did release an updated vSphere client that allowed you to managed V10 VMs but only letting you see and configure V9 and below features, even that took way to long.

 

Web GUI is important since now we have proper V10 VM management without vCenter, if you don't have that.

[NelizMastr]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Well it's more related to when they released hardware version 10 virtual machines which initially could only be managed by the new web management interface, only available at the time with vCenter. People initially got caught out by this who upgraded existing VMs to V10 and could no longer manage them at all if they did not have vCenter.

 

VMware did release an updated vSphere client that allowed you to managed V10 VMs but only letting you see and configure V9 and below features, even that took way to long.

 

Web GUI is important since now we have proper V10 VM management without vCenter, if you don't have that.

Hmm, very interesting background info. Thanks for that! The only issue now is that they haven't released the HTML5 update yet. After that, I'll gladly move to the web GUI permanently.

But let's stop hijacking this topic. And just kindly point OP to the option of ESXi for his use case hehe

[Mikensan]

Gaming with the computer certainly presents a challenge, ESXi isn't really intended to be used that way but certainly supports VT-d / hardware pass through. It's not going to be as simple as unraid however. Assigning USB devices is a little challenging.

 

What did you want to do with FreeNAS that couldn't be done with unRaid? I'm pretty sure unRaid supports Docker which should get you plex and all the fun plugins of FreeNAS. 

 

To answer you question stated at the bottom of your post... Plex is dynamic and can scale based on your hardware, but it can certainly eat up a lot of CPU power when transcoding, depending on your settings. Though even 3 1080p streams being transcoded doesn't really eat up much. Everything else doesn't appear to be very CPU intensive. I'd setup folding on whatever baremetal OS you chose, inside of a docker/jail/container. If windows is inactive and your folding kicks into overgear, then plex and the nas are going to suffer.

 

 

*Note, I am more biased towards FreeNAS/ESXi but since you want to game with this PC it isn't something I'd recommend. Just make sure you have a SSD purely dedicated to VMs, and a separate SSD if you want caching (or at least partition the SSD).