Virtualized gaming rig and/or NAS

This is gonna be fun.

Alright, here's my current gaming rig:

i5 2500k

AsRock z77 Pro 4

12Gb of RAM (pretty sure 8 would be enough for me)

GTX 570

Windows 7

Some HDDs and an SSD

 

I am trying to come up with a good plan to tackle my current problem: Building an energy-efficient NAS. And by energy-efficient I mean pico PSU and ~10W ( without HDDs I guess :( ) idle. I was going back and forth between ECC and non-ECC hardware for this (to ZFS or not to ZFS). This will be mainly used for storing TV shows, movies and other stuff i download. I don't need 200MB/s, just enough to read, transcode and stream 1080p. During my research on that i found out Haswell idles low enough to meet my requirements, so at one point I thought about replacing my desktop with a non-k Haswell i5 (non-k for VT-d) and having it run ESXi (or Xen?) hosting my NAS and a Windows machine with passed through graphics for gaming. Then i remembered the horrible idle consumption of the 570 and trashed that idea temporarily.

Since Windows started bluescreening on me last sunday (let's assume the hardware is fine and this is just software), I kinda want to build this asap. My plan is as follows atm:

Get a non-k equivalent processor as a replacement for the desktop so I can have a gaming Windows VM (VT-D for PCI passthrough) and Linux for regular usage (browsing porn and stuff) and build a NAS with some hardware, have ESXi (or possibly Xen) run on it providing both a steamOS (that NAS is probably gonna be somewhere close to the TV. In Home Streaming anyone? All reviews I can find are done over shitty WiFi. What about gigabit lan?) and the NAS Linux.

For the NAS hardware, I've been going back and forth with ideas. From cheap H87 boards with Celerons over Pentiums on C226 boards with ECC ram to i5 4420Ss on z87 boards.

Oh yeah, did I mention my budget for the NAS is about 500€ which is about 500$ due to local pricing? Feel free to make it 350 before drives, I have some to use until I can afford a batch of WD Reds (or whatever you recommend).

I still hope someone has an amazon link to a crazy 'shut off your grafics card with a switch' PCIe bridge so i can combine PC and NAS. That would still leave the question of a PSU cabable of handling low loads during idle and the 570 gracefully.

I also checked out the AsRock quadcore Avaton board. Great features, but dat pricetag.

I have a bit of experience with ESXi and some others with a lot of experience with it, so I preferred that. If Xen or other hypervisors have a trick up their sleeves that magically solves one of my many problems, shoot. Let's just assume that licenses (especially MS) are not a problem and do not add any cost for me *cough*.

 

Hope someone was able to make it through this convoluted mess of information and sillyness.

You don't need ECC for ZFS any more than you need it for any other file system. I'm not sure if that's what you meant (with the parenthesis), but I'd like to make sure there are no misconceptions there :).

You will want ZFS for a NAS (you will never go back). I'd also very strongly suggest a FreeBSD based NAS appliance such as FreeNAS.

ECC is not necessary for a small freenas build, but it really does give a peace of mind. Anything larger than 10tb I'd say go ahead and get the ecc memory, especially with zfs's ARC (adaptive replacement cache, which is so kick ass)

The asrock server motherboard that wendell did a video on is absolutely perfect. His system with that board pulled ~100w from the wall under full load, all the drives under huge stress. You can't go wrong with it. Best of all, it's in your price range, even with 4gb of ecc memory, case, and tiny psu.

As Freq Labs said, once you go ZFS, you never go back. It puts multi-thousand dollar raid cards to shame.

Sorry it took me a while to get back here.

First of all about needing ECC for ZFS: I went back and forth about this in my head for a couple of days, researched it and came to the conclusion that you do. Not only could a single file or its hash get corrupted, you also have a (admittedly smaller) chance of corrupting your whole pool to the point of making it unmountable.

A nice metaphore I read somewhere (I'd give credit if I knew where I read it):

If you were offered a million dollar to press a button that has an 8% of giving you a painful but not at all dangerous shock, you'd likely do it. If you were given a million dollar for pressing a button that has an 8% chance to shock you and from that 8% there's a 5% chance it'll fry you into a pile of ash, you're waaaaay less likely to press it.

Now guess which button ZFS without ECC is.

 

Now, I have come to a decision today:

My workplace enabled me to get an insane deal on a Dell PowerEdge T20 (it's a tower, nothing rack-ish. The smallest config (which is the one I took) sports a C226 (server grade chipset, necessary for ECC), a Pentium G3220 (also ECC-capable) and guess what: 4GB of ECC ram. Drawbacks: No HDD included, only 4 sata ports onboard. Meh, I guess I can always get a PERC on ebay). Since my father needs a new pc for his home office, I intend to give him the Pentium and grant myself a Xeon 1225v3, which is again cheap through the workplace, especially if you substract the money i get from the Pentium. A single 8GB stick of ECC ram and 2 WD Reds (2TB each i think, not sure yet) should do for starters, right?

 

Pretty sure I'll ignore the warnings on virtualizing FreeNAS and host it on ESXi, giving it direct access to the SATA controller via VT-D. Might additionally host SteamOS for in-house streaming (I think the NAS might be in HDMI range of my TV, I enjoy playing Assassin's Creed with my girlfriend). Having ESXi, VT-D and a strong CPU from the beginning gives me the option to virtualize my desktop on it whenever I want. I'll probably do it when my GTX 570 starts feeling rusty. Maxwell will be long out by then so idle power consumption should not be a problem then. I can also add ram as needed, my desktop should be fine with 9GB allocated to it.

 

I haven't pulled the trigger on the Dell yet. Speak now or forever hold your peace.

Not sure if I want to keep the Dell case or put it into that old DIGN H7 a friend of mine had lying around. Pico-PSU? http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/dell-poweredge-t20.18989/ says that same system with four Red drives spinning up draws 90W. Kinda tempted to build the 2HDD system with a 90W pico-PSU for efficiency's sake.

 

Edit: Wow, what a wall of text and yet I'm quite sure I forgot to mention I'm not sure my workstation is reeeeally necessary anymore since my laptop's 4702MQ and GT 750M are able to fill in for most usage and even TF2, which is what I play almost exclusively these days (except for the occasional AC with the gf as mentioned above. Meh). Probably gonna back up my data from the windows installation and try a reinstall, if the installer doesn't start/install I'm considering this thing broken and will try to find out which parts are working and therefor ready for eBay. Might just use the profits from that for a 750 TI and l2mediumdetails.