I had recently purchased a Dell Poweredge R420 to replace my aging R310 server that acts as my central storage node. I began to have need to have the ability to run virtual machines and FreeNAS does support running virtual machines. I found out my R310 CPU is too old to run vm’s under FreeNAS. No problem. I knew the 310 is an aging server so I figured I would upgrade my storage server. i chose the R420 as the replacement because i wanted to have more than 4 Hard Drives in the small 1U form factor. I have been building up the parts for it over the intervening months….and then the HDD world drastically changed. All high density(larger than 1TB SATA) drives have gone to something called SMR. In a nutshell SMR does not work well with disk arrays of any kind..RAID, ZFS, nothing. Well poop. With nearly all high density 2.5 drives now being SMR my r420 is no longer suitable as a new file server. That means I will be putting it into cold storage(until i sell it or stick it in my DC). Thanks to the IRS(which effectively paid for my Sonata’s maintenance) I now have an R520 on the way. This is an 8x 3.5″ HDD server that has one consequence of handling hte larger 3.5 inch HDD’s. it is now a 2U machine. Nothing iI can do as i wanted the 8 drives and not just the four. That will take the place of everything:
R610
R410
R310
R210
R420
It will be my new FreeNAS machine that will also be my virtualization host as well as file server. Once i get things transferred over I can then start packaging up the rx10’s and the 420 for sale(except for the 310 that has another home waiting for it).
So what is the first step? I have to take the ram out of the 420 and put the ram back into the 610 so i can pull all of the data off that machine and put on my current NAS. Once that’s done I can then strip the ram out of it for installation into the incoming 520. Once the 520 comes in I can then assemble it. Once it’s ready to go then i install FreeNAS onto it and then suck all of the data from the 310 to the 520. Once that is done then i restore the config form the 310 to the 520 and then shutdown the 310. If all goes well then the 520 just simply takes over as the new file server while i save up to start buying ram for it. I’ll post here as i do each section of the conversion..:)