AMD and ECC FreeNAS solution

[roborob1023]

I'm looking at building a freenas server for my home which would possibly be setup to do a virtual lab environment as well for pen-testing. My question is: What AMD Motherboards/CPUs fully support ECC RAM? As I really don't want to go over $1000. If I could get an intel system used which would have the specs to run a virtual enviroment as well as the NAS Solution that would be another option as well.

 

I have three Solutions currently in the works on PCpartspicker.com  Build specs below.

 

Intel Build

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/rJcyjc

 

AMD Build

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/sPyNKZ

 

Virtualization Server - Could have Higher CPUs

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/v3rCGf

[WereCat]

Almost all if not all Asrock motherboards support unbuffered ECC in ECC mode, some ASUS boards do as well. (Ryzen)

[brwainer]

A pretty reliable resource for whether a given Ryzen or Threadripper motherboard supports ECC is reviews by LevelOneTechs, they haven’t reviewed every one, but they have reviewed a lot, and they usually mention ECC, especially if it works. If you aren’t sure about a particular board, I think you’d have better luck getting a good answer from their forum than here.

[Oxydoreduction]

7 hours ago, WereCat said:

Almost all if not all Asrock motherboards support unbuffered ECC in ECC mode, some ASUS boards do as well. (Ryzen)

I've got 2 Asrock AM4 motherboards and I can confirm that they both support ECC ram in ECC mode, even the lowest end ones.

[NelizMastr]

Why FreeNAS exactly if you also want to do labs and whatnot? It's primarily a storage operating system. I'd personally opt for a hypervisor like ESXi (free), XenServer (free), Proxmox VE (kinda free) or even UnRAID which this forum jizzes all over ($59 and up). Run an instance of FreeNAS or Xpenology or whatever for your shares from there so you'll have more options to do other things as well.

[Oxydoreduction]

2 hours ago, NelizMastr said:

Why FreeNAS exactly if you also want to do labs and whatnot? It's primarily a storage operating system. I'd personally opt for a hypervisor like ESXi (free), XenServer (free), Proxmox VE (kinda free) or even UnRAID which this forum jizzes all over ($59 and up). Run an instance of FreeNAS or Xpenology or whatever for your shares from there so you'll have more options to do other things as well.

I agree.

ESXi cycle of developpement is slow so the 6.5 version doesn't run perfectly with AM4 cpu's at this time, you'll have to deactivate smt (https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-working-with-vmware-esxi-6-5/).

I would suggest XenServer or why not Hyper V which is also free ( but things get a little more complicated to connect to the server).

[NelizMastr]

32 minutes ago, Oxydoreduction said:

I agree.

ESXi cycle of developpement is slow so the 6.5 version doesn't run perfectly with AM4 cpu's at this time, you'll have to deactivate smt (https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-working-with-vmware-esxi-6-5/).

I would suggest XenServer or why not Hyper V which is also free ( but things get a little more complicated to connect to the server).

Yeah, I expect AM4/TR4 support to come in 7.0 or maybe 6.5U2, who knows. I forgot about the free Hyper-V Server 2016, I'm actually testing that at the moment and it seems to work pretty nicely so far. Connecting to it without AD is a tad tricky to get working, but oh well

[roborob1023]

Main thing I want is the NAS functionality I know FreeNAS 11 has the Hypervisor builtin. I also know that the ZFS file system will provide the best use of the storage which will be in the device. I do plan on going further into IT security for my career. That is the reason behind wanting the VM environment.

[gamerking]

On 11/6/2017 at 9:30 PM, roborob1023 said:

I'm looking at building a freenas server for my home which would possibly be setup to do a virtual lab environment as well for pen-testing. My question is: What AMD Motherboards/CPUs fully support ECC RAM? As I really don't want to go over $1000. If I could get an intel system used which would have the specs to run a virtual enviroment as well as the NAS Solution that would be another option as well.

 

I have three Solutions currently in the works on PCpartspicker.com  Build specs below.

 

Intel Build

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/rJcyjc

 

AMD Build

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/sPyNKZ

 

Virtualization Server - Could have Higher CPUs

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/v3rCGf

i would just go intel freenas at least when i ran it on 8320e wasnt fun experience . i would expect threadripper/ryzen to work on freenass . intel is the safe bet its less issues from when i asked on here when i bought my nas . i had a MB that took ecc/alot of people had used for freenas so i had the best chance at the time . have you thought going linux i ant good a linux and its fairly simple for vm's/storage servers

[leadeater]

17 hours ago, NelizMastr said:

Yeah, I expect AM4/TR4 support to come in 7.0 or maybe 6.5U2, who knows. I forgot about the free Hyper-V Server 2016, I'm actually testing that at the moment and it seems to work pretty nicely so far. Connecting to it without AD is a tad tricky to get working, but oh well

More likely in a 6.5 U update, 7.0 isn't coming that soon. ESXi already supports AMD EPYC far as I'm aware so the only unsupported features of Ryzen/TR should be the chipset delivered LAN/SATA etc which you could just disable in bios and use AICs instead.

[brwainer]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

More likely in a 6.5 U update, 7.0 isn't coming that soon. ESXi already supports AMD EPYC far as I'm aware so the only unsupported features of Ryzen/TR should be the chipset delivered LAN/SAT etc which you could just disable in bios and use AICs instead.

I thought most of the AMD Zen motherboards I’ve seen had Intel, Killer, etc NICs, not something driven by the chipset (meaning that they just use PCIe lanes from the chipset, the chipset doesn’t have a NIC builtin). But for anything else on the chipset, yeah i believe that they aren’t on the support lists with builtin drivers yet.

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, brwainer said:

I thought most of the AMD Zen motherboards I’ve seen had Intel, Killer, etc NICs, not something driven by the chipset (meaning that they just use PCIe lanes from the chipset, the chipset doesn’t have a NIC builtin). But for anything else on the chipset, yeah i believe that they aren’t on the support lists with builtin drivers yet.

Yea the NIC shouldn't matter but without knowing what someone actually has that's about best I can say, if it don't work disable it and try again .

[brwainer]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yea the NIC shouldn't matter but without knowing what someone actually has that's about best I can say, if it don't work disable it and try again .

I wonder if there is a VIB for the “Azalea HD audio” builtin to the CPU  what function would that even have with ESXi? Maybe its in its own IOMMU group and can be passed through to a VM?

[Oxydoreduction]

4 hours ago, brwainer said:

I wonder if there is a VIB for the “Azalea HD audio” builtin to the CPU  what function would that even have with ESXi? Maybe its in its own IOMMU group and can be passed through to a VM?

Audio is almost always an added chipset.

As long as your motherboard supports it, you can make almost any device passthrough to your vm, the integrated SATA controller is one of the few exceptions I believe.

[brwainer]

2 hours ago, Oxydoreduction said:

Audio is almost always an added chipset.

As long as your motherboard supports it, you can make almost any device passthrough to your vm, the integrated SATA controller is one of the few exceptions I believe.

I was making a joke about integrated devices that ESXi probably doesn’t support. The specifications for Ryzen CPUs includes “Azalia HD Audio device” which from what I can tell is the same idea as the “AMD HD Audio” on Radeon GPUs, or the “Intel HD Audio” that is part of the integrated graphics on their CPUs. Why Ryzen has integrated audio when it doesn’t have integrated video is beyond me. You are right that most motherboards have a seperate audio device, but there is still one integrated, and I was making a joke about it not being supported.