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Proxmox - Free and Open Source Hypervisor

Proxmox - Free and Open Source Hypervisor
Photo by Taylor Vick / Unsplash

I'm changing my home lab environment around a little and trying to get a bit more flexibility in my storage and hypervisor setup, and I would love some advice regarding which NAS operating system might be best for my environment.

Apologies in advance for the long post!

TLDR - Looking for a fast NAS operating system for storing lots of large virtual machine images FreeNAS is probably the answer, but I thought I'd see what people thought first.

I currently have an all-in-one type of setup with ESXi hosting everything with HBA's passed through physically to an XPEnology (Synology) NAS storage and jack-of-all trades system that's running lots of dockers with cloud sync, plex, hydra, sabnzbd, sonarr, etc. It then hosts a lot of firewalls, and networking VM's as I have a big lab environment for testing.

My thoughts are to split it up and have separate storage and hypervisors, and I'm trying to work with the hardware I already have while adding relatively inexpensive parts for more speed

I will probably switch hypervisors every now and again, but want the storage to be more static

Networking is 2 x Juniper EX2300-C switches so I have 4 x 10G SFP's, but 2 of those are used connecting the switches as they are at opposite ends of my house.

This is the hardware I have and my rough thoughts right now...

Storage system Operating system is unknown, but I would like it to be flexible and fast Hopefully I can get this to saturate 10G and provide VM storage to networked hypervisors I could possibly host cloud sync, plex, hydra, sabnzbd, sonarr, etc. here

  • Silverstone CS380
  • X9SRL-F
  • E5-1660 v2 for fast single core speed
  • 64G ram
  • SSD boot drives from motherboard ports
  • NVME?
  • Mellanox CX3 connected to EX2300 at 10G
  • 1 x SAS 3008 HBA for 8 x 1TB SSD's
  • 1 x SAS 2008 HBA for random disks

Main HypervisorEVE-NG because it's like working in Visio  Hosting all sorts of Network and Security based virtual machines, and windows, linux etc.

  • NZXT H440
  • X9SRL-F
  • E5-2695 v2 for lots of cores
  • 128G ram
  • SSD/NVME local storage
  • iSCSI or NFS to NAS
  • Mellanox CX3 port 1 connected to EX2300 at 10G
  • Mellanox CX3 port 2 directly connected to my workstation at 40G

Perimeter Hypervisor ESXi or Proxmox or whatever works really Primarily hosting OPNsense firewall, Pi-hole, Honeypots, etc. Definitely switching perimeter firewalls every now and again between opensource and Juniper, PaloAlto etc. Xfinity is only 1G so I'm ok with using the onboard NIC's

  • Raijintek Metis
  • Asrock Rack E3C224D2I
  • E3-1265L v3
  • 16G ram (maxed)
  • SSD/NVME local storage
  • 2 x Intel i210
  • iSCSI or NFS to NAS, but it's going to be 1G speeds