So the new HBA card arrived last week, but I was way too busy to deal with it then. Plus, I like to plan things out when doing installations like this.
Anyways, I woke up earlier than expected this morning, and since my wife was still asleep, I decided that it would be a great time to get the new HBA installed and configured. I figured that should only take about 30 minutes. Little did I know, the universe had other plans.
I had placed an order a week ago for the new 2.5″ 1TB SAS drives, and today they arrived. So looking forward to plugging these drives in and getting some larger storage pool going for the server.
As mentioned in my September posting, I’ve only just recently realized that the hardware RAID card that came with the Dell PowerEdge R610 was less useful in today’s homelab.
So, I’ll need to source a new HBA (Host Bus Adapter) card in order to leverage ZFS, but everything I’ve read since shows that I should be good to order an HBA with IT (Initiator Target) Mode and the drives I’ve selected will then automatically pass-thru to TrueNAS and be capable of using software RAID-Z.
The drives I can slot immediately, but will I play with the PERC 6/i and use a hardware-based RAID for the time being? I don’t know. It seems I bought these last two components in the wrong order…
It took a while for my SSD to be delivered, but today I was able to install Proxmox on the Dell PowerEdge Server! Some of my future projects for VMs or Containers:
The one part that I neglected to fully research properly when I bought the Dell PowerEdge R610 Server was the pricing of the SAS 2.5 inch drives. So of course that’s going to be the part that comes back to bite me in the ass. And today, it did!
Today I found out the pricing on 2.5 inch SAS drives is crazy expensive the higher the capacity you try to go! I had originally planned on sourcing some 2TB drives, as those are the highest capacity available for my existing PERC (PowerEdge RAID Controller) 6/i, but those are $180 to $220 each! So I’ll need to research that further and see what my options are…
In the meantime, I’ve already found at least one solid option to help get this server off the ground!
A workaround that I can use is to pull the optical drive and hookup a 2.5 inch SSD to the cable instead. The system will recognize this as a boot drive and I can load Proxmox onto that. I’ll still need to get some drives for the backplane, but this will buy me some breathing room so I can take my time to find a good deal somewhere.
I just recently bought a new (to me) Dell PowerEdge R610 Server from my Green Recycling provider of choice: eWasteGurus in Sacramento. I purchased it with the dual Xeon x5670 CPU package, and 64Gb of ECC Memory! Sweet!
No Hard drives though, so I’ll need to source those on my own, which is no big deal.
This ought to keep me busy in the coming weeks and months as I build out my future ProxMox Virtual Environment Server, along with its VMs and Containers. Woot! So incredibly excited to start down this path!