Digithead's picture

First I'd like to say that I think what you folks are doing is so stinking COOL.  :-D  I've been poking around here for a while now mostly out of curiosity but also because I see some really useful tools here.

To that end, as well as to accomodate a project I'm working on with my home network, I'm looking to put some hardware together specifically for the "File Server - Simple Network Attached Storage" ISO. My goal is to replace a Buffalo Link Station Pro Quad with something that would be a little more like a REAL NAS and it looks like this will do the trick.

I'm curious if anyone has ever run this on something like an Intel desktop board with an on-board SATA RAID controller in a RAID-5 configuration. If I'm not mistaken, the Intel on-board "RAID" on such motherboards is still technically a "software RAID"... but speed isn't really what I'm after. Just redendancy and availabilty. I intend to depoly a Unitrends Enterpise Essentials VM to backup several servers (two Windows AD's and two Ubuntu Servers) that live on a VSphere host and then use the "NAS" as the targer for the backup data.

Sort of long-winded there... but any thoughts about whether this would run on such a configurtion of hardware...  ?   :-D

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Although I haven't really fiddled with RAID (software or hardware) so I can't help in that department.

As for deployment, personally I can't go past Proxmox (free open source Debian based) running as a hypervisor. I have been running Proxmox on ~7yo desktop hardware (CPU: Core2Duo @~2GHz; RAM maxed out at 8GB) for years now and it's been working sweet. I am in the process of upgrading the hardware (I'm running out of RAM with the ~20 VMs that I have loaded on it). One of the VMs I have is a fileserver appliance (old v12.0; needs updating - that will be part of the upgraded hardware process). I have other software installed in the fileserver as well and it currently streams media all over my house and it works awesome!

Obviously YMMV but I think that assuming it's not too low spec hardware (it must be 64 bit and also provide CPU virtual extensions i.e. AMD-v/Intel vt-x) the additional overhead of a hypervisor is well worth the added flexibility you get by not installing bare metal...

Also FWIW to use the current version of TKL you need a 64 bit capable CPU anyway. If it's older than that you'l;l need to use the previous v13.0 release...

Digithead's picture

Thanks for the reply Jeremy, it's deeply appreciated. :-D

Yeah... was looking at the hardware so that it would actually be a seperate physical device from the existing VSphere server. I think it would also allow me to use a removable disk for archiving and D/R as well. Since this would actually be new hardware, it'll definately be a 64-bit capable motherboard but I'm also betting that I can very likely get it running on the RAID array. I'm one of those "bang on it 'till ya figure it out" type of guys anyway. :-D  If you're curious how it turns out I'd be happy to keep you posted once I have it going. Will likely be a few weeks though before I can squeeze the hardware into the budget.

 

If it ain't broke... it needs a lot more fix'n.

Jeremy Davis's picture

New hardware will work fine! Personally I'd still use a hypervisor simply because it seems like such a waste of hardware resources to not do it that way (my old server has served me well for a long time now...)! Regardless though it'll run fine directly on any (64 bit x86) hardware you will come across. A low level Atom with 512MB RAM+ should be fine (my file/media server container has 1vCPU & 512MB RAM).

And yeah I'd love to hear how things go. Actually installing TurnKey with RAID would make a great tutorial! Our current installer doesn't provide it as an option so you'll need to do a post-install RAID install/config. We don't have tons of requests but we do get the odd one for RAID so it'd be cool to be able to point other users in the right direction!

Digithead's picture

Excellent! Then I'll let you know just as soon as I have the hardware and am up and running with it.  :-D

If it ain't broke... it needs a lot more fix'n.

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