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Building a dual processor (DP) server is not a tough task, but it does have a few considerations for anyone looking to build one from scratch. I was building a DP platform for a few reviews and decided to take the opportunity to take some pictures. This is a quick build guide to a dual Xeon system with three add-in 10Gb NICs and three (additional) eight port controllers. Read the full story

A commonly asked question is what makes up a good RAID controller. There are many purveyors of RAID cards out there that will sell a FakeRAID solution supporting RAID 5 or RAID 6 for a premium. Read the full story

With Windows Home Server 2011 coming out in the near future many less experienced home users are looking into RAID subsystems to create larger storage pools. This is a segment where without a very solid basic understanding of what the technologies involved are, a user can make a purchasing decision detrimental to their machine’s ultimate performance and data security. It is important that a user understands the relative strengths and weaknesses of different RAID philosophies, software RAID, “Fake-RAID”, and hardware RAID. Read the full story

My main server, the Big WHS now houses over 60TB of storage, runs multiple VM’s, and has over 10 Gigabit NICs. At the heart of this server, is a Supermicro X8ST3-F. It was not the first motherboard I tried in the server, as I originally tried using an ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer in the Big WHS, but it has been running solidly since its first installation. Aside from its stability, it also comes with many PCIe slots, an onboard LSI 1068e based 8 port SATA/ SAS controller, dual Intel Gigabit NICs, onboard video, and IPMI 2.0 with KVM over IP.

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The Big WHS was originally supposed to house approximately 30TB of storage when the plans were first detailed on an Excel spreadsheet BOM in December 2009. This was a big upgrade to my first DIY Windows Home Server box that had well under 20TB. About five months later, the storage capacity has crested 60TB, with further room to expand. The Big WHS now spans two 4U Norco cases (using a total of 8U of rackspace and another 4U chassis is in the works) has over 60TB of storage, and requires well over a dozen ports on the gigabit switch.

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As I mentioned in the previous post on the compatibility issue, I had to RMA my Supermicro X8SIL-F (mATX LGA 1156 server board with IPMI 2.0 and dual Intel gigabit NICs) last week because it was version 1.01 PCB instead of v1.02. The difference being support for Clarkdale CPU’s.

Just to give an idea of why Supermicro’s support is so good here is the timeline:

1. Sunday (day 0) - Sent a note to Supermicro tech support explaining my problem.
2. Monday morning (day 1) - Received a confirmation that I needed v1.02 PCB of the X8SIL-F to use with my Intel Core i3-530.
3. Monday afternoon – submitted my RMA request online
4. Tuesday mid-day (day 2) - was contacted by Supermicro RMA support, I gave the requried information for advanced RMA. Later that day I got a follow-up e-mail saying that the advance RMA request had to be approved and that it may take until the next day.
5. Wednesday (day 3) – confirmed that I accepted the Supermicro advance RMA policy, and that ground shipping would be fine (I live only a few miles from a Supermicro facility).
6. Thursday (day 4) – New X8SIL-F shipped.
7. Friday (day 5) – X8SIL-F was at my doorstep. I was not home to sign for the delivery, so made arrangements to pick up at the UPS facility. Bottom line is that Supermicro had the replacement board at my doorstep within 96 hours of submitting my RMA request.

Overall great service from Supermicro! I have also decided that I will house this in the Norco RPC-4220 that serves as the DAS box for the Big WHS. That way I can use it to add drives for the test environments. Odds are I will either run ESXi with a few Linux/ FreeBSD/ OpenSolaris virtual machines or just run OSes directly on the PC. I am also planning to power this system independently of the rest of the enclosure and drives so that I can power cycle the server without taking the drives off of the Areca array.

Just as a quick note. I purchased a Supermicro X8SIL-F (mATX LGA 1156 server board with IPMI 2.0 and dual Intel gigabit NICs) last week, along with two 2TB Western Digital Green EARS drives using advanced format, and two Hitachi 2TB drives. First off, I was very excited about the X8SIL-F because it is a great mATX motherboard with IPMI 2.0, three PCIe x8 and one PCI slot with two onboard Intel NICs. My plan was to use those expansion slots for:

1. PCIe #1: Areca ARC-1300
2. PCIe #2: Intel Pro/1000 PT Dual
3. PCIe #3: HP SAS Expander
4. PCI #1: Intel Pro/1000 GT

That would give me well over 30 SATA ports (since there would be onboard SATA also) and five gigabit network ports (all Intel), and an option to expand to seven assuming I swapped the dual Intel NIC for a quad. I wanted to have a ZFS test box for FreeNAS/ OpenSolaris and for a physical or secondary Hyper-V installation of Windows Home Server v2 VAIL in the future. I had also ordered 4GB of ECC DDR3 1333 since I wanted lots of cache for ZFS.

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If one browses this site they will quickly see that I am a fan of Hyper-V virtualization and also Windows Home Server. On April 26, 2010, Microsoft released the public preview of the long awaited Windows Home Server V2 codenamed VAIL. Of course, I did have a test system lying around, but the WHS V2 code base is supposed to be Windows Server 2008 R2 which is why it requires a 64-bit CPU. Now, I could have installed the VAIL preview onto a physical machine, but there are probably editors at 30 sites doing that right now. So how about something interesting, and more appropriate for software labeled beta and preview, a Hyper-V installation!

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In previous articles we have shown how to set up a basic Hyper-V virtual machine that works with FreeBSD and FreeNAS as well as how to configure the Hyper-V VM and boot FreeNAS in it. The next step of course is to install FreeNAS to a vhd, so it no longer needs to run off of the LiveCD. This is primarily important so you can configure FreeNAS and save that configuration through reboots. Also, as FreeNAS seems to only work with drives attached to the IDE controllers, installing FreeNAS to a vhd allows one to free up one IDE channel for another drive (by removing the default DVD drive).

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As many have read, I have been trying different NAS solutions on the Big Windows Home Server. This guide will show the base procedures for installing open-source NAS/ SAN appliances such as FreeNAS, OpenFiler, Ubuntu (and other Linux distros), OpenSolaris (and variants such as CentOS) into a Hyper-V VM. 

For this guide, I will be using screenshots from the Hyper-V manager in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft offers a free Hyper-V Server R2 product for those that want to try and do not have access to a Server 2008 R2 testbed. Later I will detail installing the OS’es onto the Hyper-V platforms, but I wanted a base article that showed the basics so I can link rather than duplicate later (think of this as WordPress Dedupe). It should be noted up-front this guide is for a non-Windows Hyper-V installation. Also, everything below can be changed as necessary for your environment/ installation. 

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