Latest Project – VM Servers

[Dave Rice]

<p>I have too many boxes hanging around the house or in the cloud, running VMs for testing and VMs for controllers. Time to consolidate and move it all on premises if I can.</p>
<p>I nabbed a Fujitsui Server from a factory closure – 4 x 1GB drives, small boot SSD, 16GB ECC DDR3 and a Xeon E3-1226 v3 (think 4th Gen i5). I’ve been using it to test FreeNAS and although I have used it in anger, I didn’t finish configuring it as compared to a Synology it’s very “hair shirt”. I have just discovered that FreeNAS has a hypervisor built in!</p>
<p>My current VirtualBox host is an FX850, 16GB DDR3, 2 x small SSD and a 1TB spinner, DVD, NVidia G210. It’s an old motherboard, one of the DDR2 / DDR3 cludges and is maxed out as it only has 4 SATA and no ram slots free.</p>
<p>My old everyday hack has been on loan for ages but is now back, a 4th Gen i3-4170, small SSD, 2 x 500GB spinners, 16GB DDR3. But is has a very decent AS Rock H7 Anniversary mobo with 2 free ram slots and 6 x SATA. Then there’s a Pi3B, a 4 core Celeron NUC and two cloud servers.</p>
<p>The FreeNAS now hosts 2 Linux servers consolidating the Pi, NUC and cloud server duties. The CPU rarely exceeds 10%, the VMs use 6GB and FreeNAS 2GB, the rest is used by ZFS to cache the disks so the VMs fly along. Basically it’s not breaking sweat even when there’s lots of NAS action going on too.</p>
<p>But to run Windows VMs on it I would need to upgrade the ram and the CPU. All four ram slots are in use, so 32GB EEC ram would a total replacement @ £80. A 4C 8T Xeon (think i7) is another £40 and I’d need a graphics card. I don’t really want to spend that plus it would be good to keep “production” away from testing.</p>
<p>The current FX8350 has 8 cores, fantastic, but no way to expand anything on the really old tech mobo. However it’s 16GB ram would slot straight into the H97 as would the SSDs. The i3 isn’t really up to multiple VMs but the £40 Xeon I’d researched is supported. I have loads of decent Intel fans in the spares box and I have the G210 for graphics. The Xeon is 2/3rd the price of an i7 even though it’s got more grunt.</p>
<p>So the Xeon is on it’s way but in the meantime I’ve consolidated everything into the i3 case. New spec is a Xeon E3-1231 v3 3.4Ghz, 32GB DDR3, G210, 3 x 240GB SSD and 2 x 500GB spinners. I’ve used Storage Spaces to combine 2 of the SSDs for VMs and the two spinners for backups.</p>
<p>The “RAID” effect of storage spaces on speed is absolutely zero, which I sort of expected and wasn’t the reason for doing it. It’s running very nicely as a PC, once the Xeon is in I’ll get the VMs going.</p>

[Dave Rice]

Well the Xeon won’t boot in the H97, I suspect it’s the ram. Now moved to the server with an ancient AMD graphics card in an 8x pci-e slot.

Running FreeNAS and 2 x Ubuntu server VMs is hardly registering on the CPU usage graph.

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