Hello all, I am looking for a little bit of help/suggestions on the best way to setup my configuration given my goals and what I have available to me.
So the hardware I have available is a little odd, I previously had 2 Unraid servers and 1 ubuntu server and I'm currently working to consolidate them all down onto newer hardware.
Just to lay out the land here a little bit the servers were essentially used as follows:
Server 1: Storage server, essentially just a nas but did run a few docker containers. Contains 12 rust drives.
Server 2: Compute server, this is the server that did most of my compute but really didn't have any storage and I used nfs mounts from the storage server with unassigned devices to access storage on server 1 that was needed by my vm/dockers. This server used 2 1tb SSDs and no rust drives.
Server 3: Just ran ubuntu with portainer just for some fun experimenting. Note: This physical piece of hardware is what is actually becoming my the new consolidated unraid server. This server used 1 500gb nvme SSD.
So knowing all of that here's what I think I'd like to do with the new server but I'm not sure if it's the right approach so please feel free to make any suggestions.
The new server is a 4u rack mount chassis that has 16 drive bays. I have an LSI 9300-16i in IT mode that will run the 16 bays on the chassis. The motherboard has 2 nvme slots on board and 6 sata ports.
What I was thinking might be best is to make the unraid XFS array out the 16 (2 being parity) drives for and the 500GB nvme drive a cache drive for the array, which I would very likely upgrade to a larger nvme at some point in the future.
The 2 1TB SSDs I'd like to put in a zfs pool that I can use for my docker appdata, vm disks, etc.
Let me know if you have any questions and your thoughts on this idea, thanks in advance!