For an entry level setup, this is a great setup. I have the dual socket setup, and it's not in use as of now, but will be in a few weeks as a HA Hyper V setup.
The only negative for this CPU/board combo is the power draw which is huge.
Coming to the case, I would suggest to skip the cases you have mentioned, and opt for a server case, which will allow you to have hot swap.
Additionally, you can also run FreeNAS on the physical server and run the others as VMs on top.
@cyberwarfare will give you more ideas
However, if you want to get the best, I would suggest to run a more mature production hypervisor such as ESXi or HyperV or etc...
This will allow you to have more options, including running your router as a part of the virtual infrastructure.
Finally, if you have not finalised on this, would suggest to pickup something which will be less power hungry.
@vivek.krishnan - thanks for your insights! It does give me food for thought, and I'll also be happy to hear
@cyberwarfare's thoughts.
I will be happy to use a server case, but have not been able to find any (which is not crazy expensive). I'd love hot-swap bays too.
Would you have an idea on which are the better options, at an entry level price point?
In terms of finalization, I still have to buy the CPU, HDDs, case and power supply; the motherboard and RAM though are already in my possession.
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Let me give a bit more background on how I came to these choices - that should help choose some directions going forward. [Please do note that I am a newbie and a lot of this information has been gleaned in the last week and a half so I might have some concepts wrong. I'm happy to be corrected though!]
I fear this might be a long post, so at first
TLDR;
I want to keep the system OS as Linux, and run VMs/apps/... on this as I learn and experiment (running the router on this is also one of the thoughts to experiment with). Eventually as the need for these apps/solutions gets established, I will likely move specific applications to production grade and separate physical environments (with different OS's and configs), but for now going that way would be overkill. Eventually, I might even move a number of these things to AWS or Google Cloud (but not all!).
FreeNAS itself is an experiment to figure out if it makes sense to have it running at home, and if so what kind of things I will store, what will be my data storage needs, etc. Initally I will run it on KVM. These aspects lead to a choice of ECC RAM and Xeon CPUs (more below in the longer version). I opted against a dual CPU setup for power draw reasons, and hope that a single CPU server will not bring on a crazy power bill.
The Longer Version
The idea of this setup started with my desire to get my hands dirty on Linux. I want to learn much more of Linux both on server and PC (am also moving an older laptop to Ubuntu). Eventually, this might lead to more specialized needs and setups, but for now the idea is play/experiment/learn/mess-up-and-fix (even FreeNAS at the moment is in an experimentation mode - more on this later). This is why I like to go in with an entry level system - as I move to more production for certain applications, I will likely need more specialized, mature, and expensive systems. But at that time it will all be easy, as I will then know the value of these applications to me, and what kind of power/storage I will need to meet my needs.
Linux also allows me to run VMs on KVM (also a type 1 hypervisor), as well as learn about deploying in containers. And allows me to form a solid basis before moving on to learn things in the cloud. And probably a whole bunch of other things which I don't know now.
These also then are reasons is also why I am not running VMs on FreeNAS but rather on the Linux server, and not going for other hypervisors.
Thus, I want to keep Linux running on the hardware with no other hypervisor in between (e.g ESXi or HyperV). Where I need a type-1 hypervisor, I'll go with KVM.
FreeNAS itself is an experiment. It seems to be a good use case to run on my server. I'll probably move my laptops backups and photos, videos, and music to this (after re-ripping the music and movies to lossless codecs). This will let me figure out what kind of transcoding power I will need. I'll likely also run Plex and MythTV on this. And well, whatever else comes my way that seems useful.
Once I've seen that it makes sense to have FreeNAS at home, then I'll likely move it to a stand-alone bare metal setup down the road (from all my reading on FreeNAS it is not recommended to run it virtualized and thus if I choose to stick with it, I'd rather go for the safer approach). Else, it will be consigned to the dump and I'll move on to something else.
The need to FreeNAS (including ZFS) necessitates ECC RAM - and thus all Intel Core CPUs are out. Running FreeNAS as a VM needs VT-d / PCI Passthrough. I have read the Ryzen CPUs can have issues with this. This then essentially leaves Xeon as the best feasible option.
Among the Xeon chips, I figured that I I'll go with a 26xx chip rather than a 16xx chip as I get more cores, and if ever needed I can use the 26xx chip in a dual CPU config. More cores help as I foresee running multiple VMs and I'd rather have a few more rather than less.
I'm sticking with the v1/v2 versions as they are less expensive than the v3/v4 versions (I'm trying to see if I know someone coming to India from abroad in the coming weeks who can bring one down - they are so much cheaper over there).
In terms of memory / storage (this is still an evolving structure):
- I'll have 2 SSDs running the server OS (in a mirror or RAID1)
- I'll have 2 HDDs holding the server storage - likely 2x4TB (also in a mirror or RAID1).
- I'll have 3-6 HDDs for FreeNAS - unsure if I will use 2TB or 4TB HDDs for this. Thus, I might be able to go for case with less than 8 HDD bays (but at least 6 dedicated HDD bays - hot swappable would be awesome but not mandatory in the server based FreeNAS). In production though I intend to have vdevs of 6x4TB in RAID-Z2 (this seems to be a good option from my rather limited reading). Here (in production FreeNAS) I would want hot swappable drive bays.
Hope that made sense and is not too disjointed - kind of putting together thoughts of the last week and a half.