[OmniOS-discuss] hardware specs for illumos storage/virtualization server

[John Ratcliffe]

I followed your recent thread with interest. My response is a bit 
delayed because I have been busy being ill for the last few weeks.

Like you, I am interested in setting up a "proper" media server.

I am considering putting in some serious effort to get to grips with 
OmniOS so I can use it as my server platform. For a couple of reasons. I 
like the minimalist approach. I have been away from the SunOS/Solaris 
arena for 25 years, but I like what I see, particularly ZFS.

> I think I'm finally going to get around to putting together the 
> illumos home/hobby server I've been thinking about for the past few 
> years :), and would appreciate a little feedback on 
> parts/compatibility/design.
So would I. :)

> The box is intended to be both a storage server (music/video/etc 
> media, documents, whatever) with content available via both NFS and 
> CIFS, as well as a virtualization server using kvm to run some number 
> of linux instances (the most heavyweight of which will probably be the 
> mythtv instance, but there will be a number of other miscellaneous 
> things going on). I'm thinking of using two SSD's with a partition 
> mirrored for rpool, a 2nd separate partition as L2ARC on each, and 
> possibly a third mirrored for slog (or potentially a separate SSD just 
> for slog), and a storage pool consisting of 2 6 disk raidz2 vdevs.
Thanks for pointing me at MythTV. I haven't encountered this before. Is 
this unsupported on the OpenSolaris family? Is that why you propose 
using linux?

If you can't use OmniOS for everything, would it not be better to use 
linux as the host OS when using KVM? I haven't done any benchmarking 
yet, but my understanding is that KVM "works best" with linux (whatever 
"works best" really means)?

There seems to be an Arch linux distro that is specifically for MythTV 
support. Was this the kind of install for MythTV you had in mind?

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythTV_distros
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MythTV

> For the motherboard, I'm looking at the Supermicro X9DRD-7LN4F-JBOD, 
> which is a dual LGA 2011 socket board with 16 DIMM slots, 2 x SATA3, 4 
> x SATA2, and 8 x SAS (LSI 2308 controller onboard) along with 4 intel 
> i350 based gig nics. My understanding is that illumos is perfectly 
> happy with the LSI 2308 in IT hell). It also looks like illumos works 
> with the intel i350 gig nics, and I assume there should be no issue 
> with the onboard Intel AHCI SATA controller?
You talk about illumos. Is this your preferred platform rather than OmniOS?

 From the googling I have done about the OpenSolaris family it looks 
like Intel NICs are the most reliable choice. Do you agree?

I haven't gone into any details yet. It looks like I won't be building 
it until next year. But thanks for a few ideas.

I will reread the thread again. I think Denis may have answered some of 
my questions. Any feedback is still appreciated.


John