I recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge R730 at a killer price, and intend it to be the cornerstone of my home lab. I plan to use it as both a NAS and a container server so I can set up whatever I want with it. I’m a bit unsure of what a good setup here looks like, so I’m hoping for a bit of guidance.
As my R730 has 16 drive bays, I intend for 10 of those to be high capacity HDDs for the NAS with the remaining spots for SSDs for the containers. The R730 will also have a PERC H730 RAID controller. I want a full featured NAS solution (although I am open to more lightweight solutions) so my go to thought is TrueNAS. My plan was to install Proxmox and run TrueNAS on top of it, but I am unsure if this is the best method. Does anyone have any insight on how well this works or if there’s a cleaner solution?
Addendum: Anyone have any recommendations for RAID setups? I currently have 4x900 GB 10k SAS Dell Enterprise drives but I intend to bump that up to 10x900 GB over time. I’d like to be able to add these without much hassle, but I’m unsure what to go with. It seems that ZFS can handle it well alone, but I don’t want to have gotten the good raid controller for nothing so I’m wondering if using ZFS with the RAID controller in HBA mode will be more worth it than a dedicated RAID setup. And if I’m using a RAID setup, should I go RAID or unRAID? If I go RAID, is RAID 01, 10, or 60 a better option here? Based on my research, it sounds like I’ll need a lot more drives for a proper RAID setup and it’ll be less flexible, but I would like some second opinions.
My plan was to install Proxmox and run TrueNAS on top of it
Proxmox runs ZFS natively already so there’s not much reason to bother with TrueNAS IMO. If you need SMB shares and that sort of thing you can run a container and mount the ZFS volume into it.
I currently have 4x900 GB 10k SAS Dell Enterprise drives but I intend to bump that up to 10x900 GB over time. I’d like to be able to add these without much hassle
If you want to easily add drives later on then as far as I know the only good option is the controller in HBA mode with unRAID in a VM. Hardware RAID or ZFS don’t make adding drives very easy.
I’m wondering if using ZFS with the RAID controller in HBA mode will be more worth it than a dedicated RAID setup
I think ZFS RAID with HBA mode on the controller is worth it vs traditional hardware RAID, it’s more portable, less reliant on hardware.
And if I’m using a RAID setup, should I go RAID or unRAID? If I go RAID, is RAID 01, 10, or 60 a better option here?
With 10 drives I would probably do ZFS RAIDz2 if this was my setup. (RAIDz2 has 2 parity drives like RAID 6).
Thanks for the really helpful perspective!
I have this exact setup (R730 and ZFS), but I’ll have to disagree on not using TrueNAS. There are features you may want to use, and the logical separation of the zfspool from the rest of the server has been handy. I boot and store my VMs off of SSDs outside of the main NAS pool.
If you want to use a NVMe boot drive on a PCIE card, the server isn’t natively capable of it. You need to use a USB drive to bootstrap it with Clover. I forget the exact technical details. I have had no problems leaving it in the internal usb port over a couple years so far.
Thanks for the insight. It’s something I’ll definitely consider
How do you want to access the files? Browser, SMB, NFS, iSCSI, app like syncthing?
If it were mine, I’d put all the drives in RAID 10, install Proxmox, and either use its containers or create a VM to run docker and give it a big virtual disk.
But the dell controllers aren’t very flexible with resizing the RAID. If you want flexibility, consider flashing it to IT mode if possible and then doing zfs, software raid, or LVM groups.
The files will probably be NFS, SMB, or something similar. I have a FreeIPA domain throughout my entire network and this will probably serve as where I put my backups along with whatever other stuff I want. As I intend to expand the cluster, would HBA mode on the H730 be good enough and let ZFS handle it from there?
Google IBM m1015 hba, there’s a ton on eBay for no money. It used to be TrueNAS go to. There’s newer HBAs that are faster, but I don’t think it will matter for you
If you do TN, you MUST read the manual and look at their ZFS intro guide. Trust me.
An H330 came with the server and I bought an H730 with it. I’d prefer to use one of those if possible
Just make sure it’s HBA mode and it’ll be fine. Sometimes called IT mode.
that’s generally what I’m hearing so I think I’ll give that a shot. I’ll keep the H730 on hand as I want to do some testing with it.
I’m not sure why, but it seems like TrueNAS in a VM is not recommended (I saw a thread on their forum)… I also wanted the ability to add more drives later on, so I’ve gone with UnRAID and even though it’s only been a few weeks, it seems pretty functional and I’m glad I paid the licensing fee. I am trying to do Proxmox and OPNsense on one of those fanless N305 boxes and am getting very confused!
Either trueNAS or unraid work as a vm in Proxmox, but there’s some caveats. You have to pass the whole hba/lsi pcie device to the vm so you can’t split the backplane of the server.
