newbie recommendations

[JPHobby]

Hi,

 

I am in the process of setting up my new home environment. Coming from a self built FreeBSD ZFS based server. But since the vast majority of my data is write once read very seldom (media) I consider migrating everything to UnRaid.

 

So I am about to buy a new 36bay Supermicro server (to be on the very safe side for the next years to come). Current thoughts:

• 2 * 2TB NVMe for btrfs pool
• 8 * 20TB data disks formatted XFS
• 2 * 20TB parity disks
• 64GB RAM
• 4*10GBit Ethernet

 

I would like to run approximately 2 VMs and 10-15 dockers on the system. Considerations:

 

Network: I would like to run 2*10GBit LACP to my switch infrastructure. Untagged will be the VLAN where the unraid server. I will have 4-5 VLANs with different network segments that I would like to patch through to the containers and VMs (maybe several VMs as separate virtual NICs to a freebsd VM). From what I have read so far this should be possible and fairly straight forward. Is this assumption correct?

 

Pool: Can I use the 2*2TB NVMe based mirror/RAID-1 btrfs pool for docker (appdata), VMs and array cache? I am aware that I can now use multiple pools for these purposes but is this really worth the effort considering that the vast majority of the array data is going to be media files? In case of contention I could always add 1-2 SATA SSDs in the bays and use these as cache pool. I suppose switching the cache is possible later on?

 

Pool: I would love to use ZFS mirror for this and assume 6.12 can do this but is still in beta. I would rather wait and either switch or live with btrfs which probably in this use case has no big downside over ZFS does it?

 

The cache dir plugin is probably still something I should be using, correct? It looks sensible in order to have keep of the data disks idle.

 

Since I am new to unraid (hardware not there yet so I could not really fool around with it): If I have normal data, Movies, TV, Series and Music I would probably use different shares, correct? So on the individual XFS data disks I create

 

/Movies

/TV

 

folders, create a share with split level 2 (assuming movies subdirectories is movie types and TV subdirectories are Series)  and "high water" allocation. For a music collection I would probably only create /Music with split level 0 on one of the data disks only so that new files only go to that one drive?

 

I can backup the pools appdata etc. once a day to the array if I read this correctly and it seems like a reasonable thing to do. Is there a recommended backup plugin assuming that in the future I will setup a second unraid box in a different building (10G Ethernet connection available) as a backup target?

 

Did I miss anything? Any other cool suggestions, great plugins for first time power users?

 

 

[trurl]

Sounds like you've done your homework and it all seems like a good plan.