Alright my fellow tech heads. I just got 'gifted' a project box from a former co-worker. AKA I now have an HP DL360 G7 to help keep my basement/house warm in the winter time.

However, being as it was a dump box, it's only got 8GB of ram on it and 176GB of storage (3 15K's) on the box. The upside, is it has 2 PROC's and a 4 1GB nic's it would appear.

So, I now find myself faced with two items.

1) It needs more RAM. My intention is to mount this thing in my basement use a Meraki Cisco Switch as a firewall/VPN (MX64 might have one for free coming my way) and spin up guests to use as a home lab that I can connect to and show off at conferences.

2) I need more disk. Since its a 1U box putting more in the system itself is a no go. I'm thinking more along the lines of actually getting a home NAS/SAN.I'm thinking maybe something like THIS

But I'll be the first to admin, I ain't a storage guy, I'm a Systems Center Suite guy (thanks Microsquish for forcing me to update Configuration Manager twice a year... bastards...).

Think something like the above would be good from a connectivity standpoint to handle backups of my personal machine, and be the home for some Hyper-V guests?

If all you want is NAS, 8GB is plenty. Those Xeons are more than you need too, unless your basement is cold. Drives are getting cheap enough - just bought 2x 6TB for $175ea.

I have an unraid box running on a Old-ass AMD 3-core & 4GB of RAM. It will push 2TB of files more than fine. Best upgrade was a GB Nic replacing the 10/100 onboard.....
I'm setting up an I-5 6400 w/16GB of RAM right now to run file server + docker/VM. I'll combine my franken-desktop/media server on top of the unraid server & just use a win10 VM.

Right now I have:
FX6300 + 16GB RAM +RX460
FlexRAID 12TB of storage
Plex
Downloads, etc.

New:
i5-6400 16GB RAM
18TB+ Unraid
Docker: Plex, downloaders, etc
VM - Win10 w/GFX passed through, should have bare metal performance.

quote:

If all you want is NAS, 8GB is plenty. Those Xeons are more than you need too, unless your basement is cold. Drives are getting cheap enough

Sorry, this was my bad for not being clear. I'll be setting the HP server up as the host. Looking for something to use as a NAS to store the guests that will live on that host.

Not planning to use the Server itself as a NAS. So:

1HP Server (Host - Server 2016 - probably run a DC, SCCM, SCORCH, SCISM servers on it as well as a SQL instance too for playing).
1 NAS - Provide storage to the host as basically a cheap SAN. This ideally can back up my gaming/media personal desktop as well as acting as a storage sollution for my guests VHD's.
1 Cisco Meraki Firewall to provide access from anywhere to the NAS and HP server.

Could be a very good host.
Virtualization likes LOT's of RAM and CPU cores.
You have the CPU covered but 8gb won't cover many guests.
I lieu of a NAS just replace the 15k drives with something larger, or if you have the room just add some more drives, 15K isn't necessary.
If you need some HP drives for their hot swap bay I have a vendor here that specializes in HP refurbishing and parts ~ pretty cheap.
I replaced a HP server redundant power supply for a client at a fraction of HP cost.
I can get you the info if you are interested.

 
Unless you need features like RAID, I would forgo NAS in favor of DAS, which you can share. Most NAS use proprietary file systems, which make the drive difficult (but not impossible) to read if the NAS fails. A nice 4+TB drive in a USB 3.0 enclosure will serve you fine for backups.
 

Logrusmaster,

Several of may co-workers are Synology NAS users and for home use to have storage it is the best solution in their opinions.

It's on my list of upgrades for the home network.

I already have the Meraki solution.

You said hyper-v - so that tells me you'd be using a windows server.
The machine you linked is purely a NAS box (ie. not SAN). So this tells us it can run CIFS, NFS, and maybe some FTP and AFP.
Since you'll be using a windows server the only one of those that would be of use to you would be CIFS.

Personally I've never tried running hyper-v over a CIFS connection. (I've only done it via SAN - iSCSI or FCP)
It sounds painful - especially depending what version of SMB (SMB1 is VERY chatty on the network.)
Sadly the documentation for that device you linked does not tell us what SMB version it runs - although I'd expect it to be at least 2.


If you're not married to the idea of using your new machine as a windows server, you could jump into the world of VMWare ESX.
If you go that route.... NFSv3 is VERY friendly to being used as a protocol for a datastore for VMs.
Last I checked, VMWare allows a free download of their software with a home license (as long as your RAM doesn't go above 32gb)(might have been 64gb - cant remember)


Sorry for what may be too much information... storage is literally my day job :P

quote:

Originally posted by mkueffer:
Logrusmaster,

Several of may co-workers are Synology NAS users and for home use to have storage it is the best solution in their opinions.

It's on my list of upgrades for the home network.

I already have the Meraki solution.

Good luck to you on the longevity, and/or
recoverabilty, of a Syngoloy or QNap vulume.
 

quote:

If you need some HP drives for their hot swap bay I have a vendor here that specializes in HP refurbishing and parts ~ pretty cheap

Good to know, unfortunately, its a 1U - so 4 slots is all you get. I'll keep that in mind, I will at least be in the market for some memory in a month or so. This project is a little back-burner as my normal work machine has 32GB of RAM, etc. 'enough' to run a DC and a test VM or two.

quote:

I already have the Meraki solution

I would certainly hope that you would already have one former co-worker has that and a new AP from attending a webinar that he is currently playing with.

quote:

A nice 4+TB drive in a USB 3.0 enclosure will serve you fine for backups

Sure it would. I have an older PhantomDRIVE 2TB drive thats been doing that forever.

quote:

You said hyper-v - so that tells me you'd be using a windows server.

Correct - Windows Server 2016 - Hyper-V

quote:

If you're not married to the idea of using your new machine as a windows server, you could jump into the world of VMWare ESX.

I'm not personally married to it but the organization I currently work for is DEEPLY involved with Hyper-V so it for this particular instance it makes sense for me to know at least a little about it even if its not something I primarily support.

quote:

Sorry for what may be too much information... storage is literally my day job :P

Nope, not too much information... My day job is being the guy with the SQL instance that consumes all your IOP's Oh and constantly asks for more space becuase microsoft decided that this months update package is going to be 10GB per O.S.

-----------

I'm pretty open to a exploring any option at this point to accomplish my goal. I'm just trying to grow my home lab resources for testing purposes and make them a little more robust.

I'm going to second smschultz on just replacing your existing drives. You're not going to take advantage of the majority of the capabilities of that Synology NAS you linked to as your server will carry that load. And since some storage configurations can demand as much as a gigabyte of RAM per terabyte of storage, you'll have to make some decisions about storage configuration before you source hardware. Personally, I'm a fan of a RAID 5 configuration, but that would cost you several drives to accomplish, but it would give you good speed and superior recovery.