January 1, 201610 yr Hi all, Jumping in the deep end here with unraid. I was impressed with the two vids Linus put up and have decided not to go with VMWare. That said, here is the kit i'll be running: HP Gen8 Microserver Xeon 1220 V2 16Gb ECC unreg DDR3 120Gb Intel SSD for Cache 3x 4Tb WD Reds (1x Parity, 2x Data) Asus GTX 730 2Gb gpu My plan is as follows: Unraid as base OS & NAS VM's for: - pfSense - Win 7 HTPC - Docker apps for Teamspeak, Plex Im hoping to hand one of the integrated broadcom GbE nics to pfSense as a red interface to the Cisco 877 router, then the other can handle all other traffic.Im also looking at handing over direct hardware access to the GPU for a win7 pc to perform HTPC connected via HDMI to my TV. If plex works with chromecasts correctly then i can ditch this in favour for a quad intel nic - which would give me a few more options for segmenting the home network (i.e. guest wifi) Anyone see any issues with the above plan? I was considering a win7 box to be a torrent PC with a vpn routed to it permanently. Not sure how that will go. Are there any issues using the br120i controller?
January 1, 201610 yr The only problem I see is I assume it's only got one PCI-E slot. And with your current plan you're going to need one for a GPU for your HTPC and one for a (at least a) dual NIC for pfsense.
January 2, 201610 yr Author The gen 8 has three nics. One dedicated to iLo and two on a broadcomm onboard controller. Should be enough right?
January 6, 201610 yr I only thing I can add to the virtualisation discussion is that I can see that a Windows 7 VM would need a graphics card but I'm surprised by the implication that pfSense needs one too. Regarding your question about the BR120i controller, make sure it's set to AHCI mode and it will work just fine with unRAID. Note that there's a fifth SATA port available in addition to the four for the hard disk bays. It's intended for use with a DVD drive in the optical bay so if you forego that drive you can use it for your SSD and release a precious bay for a fourth hard disk. The slight downside to this is that this port (along with the two rightmost HDD bays) runs at 3 Gb/s SATA II. The two leftmost HDD bays run at 6 Gb/s SATA III so you have to make a choice. Personally, I'd go for maximum HDD bays (4 x 6 TB) and slower SSD but then I only use my SSD as an unRAID cache - I don't use VMs, which is why I chose the (almost insanely) cheaper Celeron powered model with 4 GB of ECC RAM. There's a single PCIe x16 slot. Not having any VMs, the slot is currently empty. If I was to add a card in the future it would likely be an eSATA controller to further extend the capacity externally.
January 6, 201610 yr Author Thanks for the reply John. The cpu upgrade to a Xeon 1220 v2 was not too bad. $180 AUD, but compared to the initial purchase of $299 its a high price. I now have it setup with a bridge for one nic to the unraid and to the VM's. The other bridge is for eth1 and connects to my cisco 877 in bridge mode. This means I can put the GPU in as well I set the br120i to ahci mode which was good. And yes, i have the ssd on the ODD port to use as cache.
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