April 12, 201313 yr This build is based heavily (and I mean heavily) on Rajahal's 20 tower beast prototype. I did a lot of research prior to finding the prototypes and the specs were essentially what I wanted. Also thanks to Johnm for the amazingly simple to follow tutorial on getting ESXi and Unraid up and running. OS at time of building: unRAID 5rc12 Pro CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 Sandy 3.2GHz (Newegg) Motherboard: SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O (Newegg) RAM: 16GB 2x8GB Kingston ECC Unbuffered 1333 KVR1333D3E9SK2/16G (Newegg) Case: Antec Twelve Hundred V3 (Newegg) Drive Cage(s): 2x NORCO SS-500 (Newegg) Drive Cage Fan(s): 2x Coolink SWiF2 800 80mm (QuietPCUSA) Power Supply: SeaSonic X Series X650 Gold (Newegg) SATA Expansion Card(s): 1x IBM ServeRAID M1015 LSI SAS9220-8i (Ebay Search) Cables: 1x SATA, 2x Monoprice 0.5m Forward Breakout Cable (Amazon) Fans: All stock fans Parity Drive: 3TB WD Red Data Drives: 2x 3TB WD Red, 1x 2TB Seagate, 2x WD 2TB Green Cache Drive: 1TB WD Black Datastore Drive: 1TB WD Green Total Current Drive Capacity: 10 Total Upon Completion Drive Capacity: 20 Flash Drives: 2x Lexar FireFly 4 GB JDFF4GBASBNA (unraid and esxi) Virtual Machines: Unraid, Download Server (Ubuntu Server 12.04.2LTS), Router/Firewall (CentOS 6.4), Subsonic (Ubuntu Server 12.04.2LTS) Primary Use: Data storage, media streaming to HTPC, Router/DHCP/DNS Server, OpenVPN Client, toy for me to delve deeper into *nix Likes: Very quiet, runs cool, impresses friends Dislikes: Having to spend $80 x2 on two more hdd cages compared to a Norco 4220. Bending back the tabs of the Antec 1200 was a bi...pain. Add Ons Used: preclear, unMenu, cache_dirs, Simple Features Future Plans: Create a simple static webpage to allow anyone to easily find sab, sickbeard, couchpotato, headphones, subsonic on the LAN (because port numbers are hard ) Install 2x Norco SS-500 cages and 3x Forward Breakout Cables. Setup port forwarding with iptables to route external traffic to Subsonic VM. Setup VM for Rails development Setup VM for quarantined internetz Setup UPS plugin Picture: More to come Imgur Reasons for not using Unraid sabnzbd, sickbeard, couchpotato plugins. I wanted to mitigate any factor that could affect unraid. With the plugins not officially supported, I'd hate to run into an issue where any plugin causes the unraid array to go down. I love the idea of Influencer ensuring that specific plugins always work, but later down the line that might not be the case. Using a VM for the different apps also forced me to get a better understanding of samba shares especially in relation to permissions. Permissions are a friend to nobody . I do have some plugins installed like unMenu and Simple Features but I think I will remove them. They are REALLY useful though! Why a tower instead of a 4U case? It would've been cheaper in the end going with Norco 4U case because you don't need to buy hdd cages. My thought was that this server is my first unraid/server build. I want it to be quiet and sit it close to the TV. For me, it'd be hard to find a suitable place to put one of those cases. The Antec is just super tall allowing me to squeeze it into smaller places. Why use the build as a router? A couple of months ago I purchased access to a VPN. Initially I tried setting up the vpn on my Asus 520gl router running Tomato. It worked but bottlenecked my down speed because of all the encryption/decryption the router was forced to do. Encryption/decryption is not an issue with the Xeon 1230 . Issues faced in build process (hardware and software). Fitting the cages in the case. It took me 4 hours to bend all the metal tabs. I bought a 8" C-clamp (Harbor Freight Tools) for $6 and followed this thread to fix. ESXi did not recognize the second network card. I had to install a custom driver for it to be recognized. Initially I tried using steps from this thread, but it didn't work for me. I could be an idiot, idk. I ended up following this tutorial which worked flawlessly. Thoughts about the build in general as of this post. I wanted to create a server that could perform all my streaming needs, act as a router, and allow me to play around with virtual machines. This build is that. It took me many, many, many hours to get everything setup. Sure I've installed sabnzbd a billion times, but setting up all the Virtual Machines especially the router/firewall one took a long time. My issue was that I have only been vaguely familiar with linux, permissions, and networking. If you're looking to get an understanding of networking and the routing of packets, make this build.
April 12, 201313 yr I'm curious why you went with CentOS for the router/firewall and not pfSense? Seems like the obvious choice. Also, are you running two different Ubuntu VMs? One for downloading and one for Subsonic? If so why?
April 12, 201313 yr Author I looked into pfSense but I liked the idea of creating my own firewall for the experience. Yea I have two different VMs. Because subsonic will be facing the world, I wanted to lock down the entire vm.
April 12, 201313 yr Awesome build! Strangely mine is almost identical, except Mobo/CPU/RAM... Though I plan to upgrade to a similar spec to you in the future (also for ESXi). We must both have good taste in hardware I also have mine in my lounge.. have been very happy with the aesthetics and quietness of it. :-) Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S2 using Tapatalk 2
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