Jails with Xeon 5150

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dmaxx67

I just bought a Xeon 5150 with 16gb ECC RAM in an IBM Intellistation z pro unit. I am wanting to start using this unit for my home server using ZFS. I currently have an old Dell 4GB RAM core 2 duo running Ubuntu with zfs on Linux. It only has 2 2TB hard drives being mirrored at the moment.

I have on hand the two 2TB hard drives and 3 500Gb laptop hard drives for use in this unit. Should I just buy another 2TB hard rive and create a raidz1 or something else?

Also looking for some feedback on how many jails/type of jails could I run on this unit respectively.

I'd like to run a Windows 7 jail, and a jail for dev work just so as I am learning I don't screw up an entire system. Also maybe one for trying new distros out possibly. Anyways look forward to learning FreeBSD and using it to its full potential that I can utilize.
I did some research and found a lot of mixed reviews on how to set up my disks and also not enough info on jails to steer me in right direction, so this is why I came to forums to get your opinion on these questions and hope to someday be able to give something back to this community.
 
dmaxx67 said:
I just bought a Xeon 5150 with 16gb ECC RAM in an IBM Intellistation z pro unit. I am wanting to start using this unit for my home server using ZFS. I currently have an old Dell 4GB RAM core 2 duo running Ubuntu with zfs on Linux. It only has 2 2TB hard drives being mirrored at the moment.

I have on hand the two 2TB hard drives and 3 500Gb laptop hard drives for use in this unit. Should I just buy another 2TB hard rive and create a raidz1 or something else?
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I'm not sure how robust the laptop hard drives would be but you can always start with mirroring the 2TB drives and should you decide to add extra capacity in the future add a mirror of say, 4 TB, for a combined 6 TB. It comes down to personal preference as the mirrored route makes it flexible to add just another pair of mirror drives but comes at the cost of having lots of drives just there for redundancy.

dmaxx67 said:
Also looking for some feedback on how many jails/type of jails could I run on this unit respectively.

I'd like to run a Windows 7 jail, and a jail for dev work just so as I am learning I don't screw up an entire system. Also maybe one for trying new distros out possibly. Anyways look forward to learning FreeBSD and using it to its full potential that I can utilize.
Click to expand...

Since jails are just isolated namespaces, they use the same kernel as the host. So you can run FreeBSD jails on a FreeBSD host. You can do Linux jails using the linux(4) ABI translation but there are some caveats on just how much functionality you have. For Windows you would have to run emulators/virtualbox-ose.

dmaxx67 said:
I did some research and found a lot of mixed reviews on how to set up my disks and also not enough info on jails to steer me in right direction, so this is why I came to forums to get your opinion on these questions and hope to someday be able to give something back to this community.
Click to expand...

If you haven't already found it, you'll want to see the FreeBSD Handbook as there is a lot of good information there to get you started.
 
Laptop drives are just basic 2.5" drives I got laying around. Didn't know if I could run them in a raidz1 and then maybe mirror my two 2tb hard drives.

I'll read more about the jails and what I am wanting to accomplish with them before asking any more questions.
 
dmaxx67 said:
Laptop drives are just basic 2.5" drives I got laying around. Didn't know if I could run them in a raidz1 and then maybe mirror my two 2tb hard drives.
Click to expand...

You certainly can mirror the existing 2TB drives and raidz the 3 laptop drives. I just don't know how much performance the laptop drives will offer and if it will present a slow down. Unfortunately with ZFS once you make a pool you don't have the flexibility to remove vdevs (the mirror or raidz) in this case. You can add a remove a member of a mirror, add a completely new raidz, but not remove a mirror or raidz.

dmaxx67 said:
I'll read more about the jails and what I am wanting to accomplish with them before asking any more questions.
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I've been exploring sysutils/iocage more lately as they've taken an interesting approach embedded all jail configuration inside of ZFS properties. You can find a little how to at http://pid1.com/posts/post10.html and an interview with the author at http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_08_12-may_contain_zfs.
 
So upon further reading I am going to stick with my 2TB mirror and possibly upgrade later when storage needs arise. I got Z Pro in today and found I'm missing the plastic HD rails for hot swap case. Anyone have a lead on some cheap HD rails for Z pro 9228?

Anyways my next question that may need to be moved to different forum is I read a few people in larger environments using their FreeNAS as the storage for their VMs. Could I just build a nice FreeNAS unit and then use my other Linux server as a Xenserver or something equivalent but let my FreeNAS be the drives for these VMs?

All the help is greatly appreciated and I hope to pay it back in some way down the road as my knowledge grows.
 
dmaxx67 said:
Anyways my next question that may need to be moved to different forum is I read a few people in larger environments using their FreeNAS as the storage for their VMs. Could I just build a nice FreeNAS unit and then use my other Linux server as a Xenserver or something equivalent but let my FreeNAS be the drives for these VMs?
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Yes, either FreeBSD or FreeNAS will have the iscsid(8) or nfsd(8) that could serve as a backing store for VMs.
 
A little more investigating and I need to get to unit today and remove hot swap cage to confirm but there are 4 SATA ports on unit and then a mini PCI express card that is hooked to the hot swap cage. Do I just need to use the SATA ports and leave that controller card alone for use with FreeBSD/FreeNAS with zfs? This option would save me buying 30 bucks worth of HDD caddys.
 
Does the mini PCI express card just provide extra SATA ports or is it more of a hardware RAID? ZFS will handle all the redundancy portion in software so all you need is whatever gives you enough SATA ports. The hot swap caddys are always nice to have when you need as close to 100% availability but not really a requirement.
 
Alright got unit cranked up today. I need to update BIOS to 1.45 as it is on 1.41 right now. I'm also getting a CMOS battery failure so I'm trying to track one of those down.

I tried to boot from USB to run a memtest on it overnight and it wont boot from USB. Is there a way to do this or am I going to have to run FreeNAS from an SSD?

Also the SATA ports are directly connected to backplane of hot swap cage. So now I just need to get the plastic rails and I'll have a nice hot swap cage.

Anywhere here help with USB boot issue? Is this machine too old to boot from USB?
 
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Ill have to check that out.

Update: I got BIOS updated to 1.45 and changed CMOS battery with new one out another machine I don't need. About to order the hard rive rails but for now am using my evercool hard drive rack in place of the 2 5.25" slots.

Thought just came to my attention. What is max hard drive size I can run with this system. Will it recognize my 2 2TB hard drives?

I am possibly going to buy an LSi HBA later on and add WD Red 4TB HDD in a mirror, but not sure now if system will be able to use those drives.
 
I don't think you will have a problem with large hard drives. The usual failure mode is that the BIOS of an old machine sees a wrong (lower) size for large hard drives. As soon as FreeBSD has loaded, the hard drives will be correctly recognized.
 
Just an update. Got unit up and running with 2 2 TB hard drives in mirror mode. Unit runs great and I appreciate your feedback. I installed FreeNAS so I will head to their forums and start reading up over there.
 
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