Media Server blew up, help with new layout

[pronto]

Hello all,

I was running UnRAID as a media server, when multiple drives failed, incl. the parity. So I'm nuking and rebuilding my server.
Main things running are Plex, the "-arr" suite, SABnzb, Deluge, Nextcloud (or similar) among other things. Nothing wild yet.

I had my eyes on Proxmox for a while, and going to try my hand at it. I have 3 machines available, so i wanted to do a cluster.
(I read your should have 3 nodes in a cluster for voting and quorum)

Machines:
1. Dell R420 (Old UnRAID machine)

• Dual Socket Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2430 v2 @ 2.50GHz
• 48Gb RAM ECC
• 2 HBA (non-RAID) 6x SSD 8TB, 6x HDD 8TB
• Dual 1 GbE
• Nvidia P2000

2. Dell 7750 Laptop

• Single Socket Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10885H CPU @ 2.40GHz
• 128Gb RAM ECC
• 2x 1TB Nvme Drives
• Single 1 GbE
• USB 1 GbE

3. Supermicro SYS-E301-9D-8CN8TP

• Intel Xeon D-2146NT 2.3 - 3.0 GHz 8-Core Processor
• 32Gb RAM ECC
• 4x 2TB SSD Drives
• Quad GbE LAN, 2 x 10GBase-T, 2 x 10G SFP+

I'm aiming to get:

R420 to be the "Storage" node, as most drives are connected to it
7750 as the "Main" front end node, for the CPU power
SuperMicro to be a generic node (Eventually remote over VPN, but that's a later problem to solve)
Maybe a T420 later on, if time/money permits...

Is this possible? Am i missing a large variable?
Will the drives share over the network as if they are local?
eg. Can i pass though a drive on one system/node to a VM on another? Same for a GPU (Transcoding)?

I was going to have UnRAID running again in a VM (7550), to manage the storage, as I have a few more off-size drives I was going to add in, and dual parity this time.

I have TrueNAS running on the R420 right now, but am having difficulty getting my shares to go through. Tried iSCSI and SMB and NFS, but either I'm bottlenecked by 1GbE, or can't use the full disk size over iSCSI and Zvol. (Not really knowledgeable with ZFS yet)

I have Proxmox up and running on the 7750, with UnRAID VM running, and the TrueNAS shares as Unassigned device. When I download a file via Radarr and SAB, the LAN gets congested while trying to move the file from completed to the movies folder. (Moving the file to the UnRAID system and into the new folder on the NAS at the same time.)

All in all, any advice? I want to get my foundation solid before I try to do anything more complex.
Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated,

Thanks

pronto

 

[Dunuin]

2. Dell 7750 Laptop

• Single Socket Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10885H CPU @ 2.40GHz
• 128Gb RAM ECC
• 2x 1TB Nvme Drives
• Single 1 GbE
• USB 1 GbE

That sounds like a nice low-power home server. Would be interested to hear what the power consumption is when running idle and under load.
So hard to find an energy-efficient machine that checks all my requirements like dual NVMe or SATA, quiet, ECC RAM.

1. Dell R420 (Old UnRAID machine)

• Dual Socket Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2430 v2 @ 2.50GHz
• 48Gb RAM ECC
• 2 HBA (non-RAID) 6x SSD 8TB, 6x HDD 8TB
• Dual 1 GbE
• Nvidia P2000

That's not a lot of RAM for all those drives in case you want to use ZFS. Also keep in mind that PVE doesn't come with any NAS functionalities. If you want a GUI to manage stuff you probably want to run something like TrueNAS/OMV/UnRaid in a VM and then PCI passthrough those two HBAs.

Will the drives share over the network as if they are local?

There is no magic involved. If you want a shared storage you will need to provide a NFS server or use something like ceph.

eg. Can i pass though a drive on one system/node to a VM on another? Same for a GPU (Transcoding)?

No. Hardware is only local and limited to a single node.