Home server recommended for FreeBSD

C

choosy23

Hi,

I am thinking of buying a home server for experiments, running various services, etc, on FreeBSD.

I want to get the hardware that FreeBSD works with out of the box, and make things as easy as possible. I would also want to virtualize the machine, with Xen or the like, and have multiple FreeBSD vms, with different purposes.
I also plan to use zfs and its facilities.

The server I am thinking is a ThinkServer with these specifications:

Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1225V2 Processor (3.20GHz 1333MHz 8MB Quad Core) Edit
1st Memory DIMM: 4GB ECC DDR3 PC3-10600 SDRAM (1333MHz uDimm) Edit
Configuration option: Internal RAID configured by customer Edit
First hard drive bay: 500GB SATA 3.5" enterprise Hard Drive 7.2K, 3Gb/s Non Hot Swap Edit
Second hard drive bay: 500GB SATA 3.5" enterprise Hard Drive 7.2K, 3Gb/s Non Hot Swap Edit
Optical device bay: ThinkServer 16x DVD Burner/CD-RW Edit
Ethernet adapter: ThinkServer Gigabit ET Dual Port Ethernet Card by Intel Edit


Is there something that would not work good with FreeBSD ? I am not at all familiar with RAID but I read that zfs has its own way of doing RAID and I should not have anything that interferes with it. On the other hand I don't get what is "Internal RAID configured by customer" in that configuration list that I got from Lenovo's page. I guess it's nothing, meaning I would have to configure RAID myself, but I don't have any RAID controller included or anything.

Is there any other recommendation ? Something I should check, something I am missing ?

Thank you,
Stefan
 
If you're using Xen (you mention it, is this going to be all the time, or will you sometimes run FreeBSD on the bare metal hardware without Xen?), look for hardware that Xen supports.

FreeBSD will just run on whatever virtual hardware Xen presents to it.

I.e., Xen talks to the hardware. FreeBSD talks to Xen. Your compatibility issues to resolve are going to be between Xen and hardware. FreeBSD won't even know or care what the real hardware is.


edit:
And yes, go for 16 or 32GB of RAM. RAM is cheap and VMs love RAM. It will not significantly increase your build cost and make the machine much more versatile.
 
Like others have said, get lots of RAM. With ZFS and multiple VMs, you're going to need plenty. Registered ECC, if possible.

choosy23 said:
Is there something that would not work good with FreeBSD ? I am not at all familiar with RAID but I read that zfs has its own way of doing RAID and I should not have anything that interferes with it. On the other hand I don't get what is "Internal RAID configured by customer" in that configuration list that I got from Lenovo's page. I guess it's nothing, meaning I would have to configure RAID myself, but I don't have any RAID controller included or anything.
Click to expand...

Well, it's tough to know what other hardware is in that box since it's an OEM server. It's probably going to be fine, but you might want to look up the specs on the motherboard to see if Xen supports all of the components.

As for "Internal RAID configured by customer", my guess is that the drives will be attached to SATA ports that the motherboard can configure in a RAID array if you want. Most motherboards have this as an option. Generally, they don't have stellar performance, but you don't need to bother with any of those settings if you're using ZFS.
 
You might want to compare to some of the HP offerings, I was looking at a similar ML110 G7 yesterday. Fujitsu Siemens TX series are also awesome and really well built.

HP is probably a little more experienced at the server game, although I do like Lenovo laptops.
 
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