I recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge R730 at a killer price, and intend it to be the cornerstone of my home lab. I plan to use it as both a NAS and a container server so I can set up whatever I want with it. I’m a bit unsure of what a good setup here looks like, so I’m hoping for a bit of guidance.
As my R730 has 16 drive bays, I intend for 10 of those to be high capacity HDDs for the NAS with the remaining spots for SSDs for the containers. The R730 will also have a PERC H730 RAID controller. I want a full featured NAS solution (although I am open to more lightweight solutions) so my go to thought is TrueNAS. My plan was to install Proxmox and run TrueNAS on top of it, but I am unsure if this is the best method. Does anyone have any insight on how well this works or if there’s a cleaner solution?
Addendum: Anyone have any recommendations for RAID setups? I currently have 4x900 GB 10k SAS Dell Enterprise drives but I intend to bump that up to 10x900 GB over time. I’d like to be able to add these without much hassle, but I’m unsure what to go with. It seems that ZFS can handle it well alone, but I don’t want to have gotten the good raid controller for nothing so I’m wondering if using ZFS with the RAID controller in HBA mode will be more worth it than a dedicated RAID setup. And if I’m using a RAID setup, should I go RAID or unRAID? If I go RAID, is RAID 01, 10, or 60 a better option here? Based on my research, it sounds like I’ll need a lot more drives for a proper RAID setup and it’ll be less flexible, but I would like some second opinions.
How do you want to access the files? Browser, SMB, NFS, iSCSI, app like syncthing?
If it were mine, I’d put all the drives in RAID 10, install Proxmox, and either use its containers or create a VM to run docker and give it a big virtual disk.
But the dell controllers aren’t very flexible with resizing the RAID. If you want flexibility, consider flashing it to IT mode if possible and then doing zfs, software raid, or LVM groups.
The files will probably be NFS, SMB, or something similar. I have a FreeIPA domain throughout my entire network and this will probably serve as where I put my backups along with whatever other stuff I want. As I intend to expand the cluster, would HBA mode on the H730 be good enough and let ZFS handle it from there?
I’m not sure why, but it seems like TrueNAS in a VM is not recommended (I saw a thread on their forum)… I also wanted the ability to add more drives later on, so I’ve gone with UnRAID and even though it’s only been a few weeks, it seems pretty functional and I’m glad I paid the licensing fee. I am trying to do Proxmox and OPNsense on one of those fanless N305 boxes and am getting very confused!
Either trueNAS or unraid work as a vm in Proxmox, but there’s some caveats. You have to pass the whole hba/lsi pcie device to the vm so you can’t split the backplane of the server.
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