« Hyperconverged Supermicro a2sdi-4c-hln4f » : différence entre les versions

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* no external USB 3.0 ports (ony one "internal", on the motherboard itself) ; this is desirable to plug an external HDD for local backups (USB 2.0 is too slow)
* no external USB 3.0 ports (ony one "internal", on the motherboard itself) ; this is desirable to plug an external HDD for local backups (USB 2.0 is too slow)


== Hardware ==


== 2.5 or 3.5 inches drives ? ==
=== 2.5 or 3.5 inches drives ? ===


What is required for this project :
What is required for this project :
* mini tower format chassis
* Hypervisor OS on RAID 1 with two drives
* Hypervisor OS on RAID 1 with two drives
* 4 TB of encrypted data with a minimum of resilience (at least RAID 1 or RAID 5, RAID 10 or RAID 6 desired)
* 4 TB of encrypted data with a minimum of resilience (at least RAID 1 or RAID 5, RAID 10 or RAID 6 desired)
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* all disks easily accessible from the front of the chassis
* all disks easily accessible from the front of the chassis


Choosing between 2.5 (SFF) or 3.5 (LFF) inches drives is not so easy. Obviously, for raw capacity over a gigabit network, LFF HDD are unbeatable in terms of price. In France (as of march 2021), it costs ~ 80 euros for a 2 TB NAS 3.5 LFF HDD ... Same price for a 1 TB NAS SFF HDD. Moreover, SFF HDD simply doesn't exist for consumer NAS systems (enterprise SFF HDD over 2 TB exist but are way too expensive). LFF HDD are a clear winner ? What about chassis size, cooling and noise ?
Choosing between 2.5 (SFF) or 3.5 (LFF) inches drives is not so easy. Obviously, for raw capacity over a gigabit network, LFF HDD are unbeatable in terms of price. In France (as of march 2021), it costs ~ 80 euros for a 2 TB NAS 3.5 LFF HDD ... Same price for a 1 TB NAS SFF HDD. Moreover, SFF HDD over 2 TB simply doesn't exist for consumer NAS systems (enterprise SFF HDDs exist but are way too expensive). LFF HDD are a clear winner ? What about chassis size, cooling and noise ?
 
At this point, there are two choices :
* 2 * 500 GB SFF SSD (RAID 1 for hypervisor and VMs OS) plus 2 * 6 TB LFF HDD (RAID 1 storage)
* 2 * 500 GB SFF SSD (RAID 1 for hypervisor and VMs OS) plus 4 * 2 TB SFF SSD (RAID 5 storage)
 
The most reasonable would be to use LFF HDD but silent operation with a tiny chassis are very important, so let's stick with the "unreasonable" configuration !
 
=== Cooling the CPU ===
 
As seen earlier, a standard CPU fan cannot be fitted on the heat sink.
 
=== final system ===
 
* [https://www.chieftec.eu/products-detail/82/CT-01B-350GPB Chieftec mini tower case]
* [https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-4C-HLN4F Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F]
* 64 GB DDR4 RAM (RDIMM)
* [https://www.icydock.fr/goods.php?id=150 ToughArmor MB992SK-B] for hypervisor and VMs OS with 2 * [https://shop.westerndigital.com/fr-fr/products/internal-drives/wd-red-sata-2-5-ssd#WDS500G1R0A WD SA500]
* [https://www.icydock.fr/goods.php?id=143 ToughArmor MB994SP-4SB-1] for data storage (with fans off) with 4 * [https://www.crucial.fr/ssd/mx500/ct2000mx500ssd1 Crucial MX500]
* [https://www.startech.com/fr-fr/cartes-additionelles-et-peripheriques/pexusb3s25 PCIe card with 2 * USB 3.0 ports]

Version du 22 septembre 2021 à 09:28

This howto aims at describing the choices and the build of a compact homelab with a hyperconverged chassis based on a Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F motherboard. The hypervisor OS will be Slackware64-current (with Qemu/KVM for virtualization), the storage will be provided by a Truenas core VM (thanks to pci-passthrough) and network orchestrated by an OPNSense VM.


Motivations

Why such a motherboard with a modest 4 cores Intel Atom C3558 ? Let's see the advantages :

  • obviously, it's very compact (mini-itx form factor)
  • up to 256 GB ECC RDIMM RAM supported
  • the CPU has a very low TDP (~ 17W), so no need for a fancy and potentially noisy cooling solution
  • 4 * 1 Gb/s Ethernet ports (cool for a network appliance such as OPNSense and there's no need for 10 Gb/s for this project)
  • dedicated IPMI Ethernet port
  • the SATA ports are provided by two distinct PCIe lines (see below, very important for pci-passthrough and no need for an additionnal HBA card)
A2SDi system block diagram

Well, the system has drawbacks too :

  • the CPU power will not be extraordinary
  • it's not possible to put a fan directly on top of the CPU heatsink (more on that later)
  • no external USB 3.0 ports (ony one "internal", on the motherboard itself) ; this is desirable to plug an external HDD for local backups (USB 2.0 is too slow)

Hardware

2.5 or 3.5 inches drives ?

What is required for this project :

  • mini tower format chassis
  • Hypervisor OS on RAID 1 with two drives
  • 4 TB of encrypted data with a minimum of resilience (at least RAID 1 or RAID 5, RAID 10 or RAID 6 desired)
  • it is recommended not to exceed 80% of the capacity of a ZFS filesystem, so, for 4 TB of usable data, 5 TB of raw capacity is required
  • all disks easily accessible from the front of the chassis

Choosing between 2.5 (SFF) or 3.5 (LFF) inches drives is not so easy. Obviously, for raw capacity over a gigabit network, LFF HDD are unbeatable in terms of price. In France (as of march 2021), it costs ~ 80 euros for a 2 TB NAS 3.5 LFF HDD ... Same price for a 1 TB NAS SFF HDD. Moreover, SFF HDD over 2 TB simply doesn't exist for consumer NAS systems (enterprise SFF HDDs exist but are way too expensive). LFF HDD are a clear winner ? What about chassis size, cooling and noise ?

At this point, there are two choices :

  • 2 * 500 GB SFF SSD (RAID 1 for hypervisor and VMs OS) plus 2 * 6 TB LFF HDD (RAID 1 storage)
  • 2 * 500 GB SFF SSD (RAID 1 for hypervisor and VMs OS) plus 4 * 2 TB SFF SSD (RAID 5 storage)

The most reasonable would be to use LFF HDD but silent operation with a tiny chassis are very important, so let's stick with the "unreasonable" configuration !

Cooling the CPU

As seen earlier, a standard CPU fan cannot be fitted on the heat sink.

final system