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Insane $12,000 RGB Water Cooled Xeon Workstation Build

Insane $12,000 RGB Water Cooled Xeon Workstation Build

So… I need a PC Refresh

The video that launched my YouTube channel was my workstation build back in summer 2016. It had 2 Xeon E5 2660 v4 CPUs with 14 cores each. That’s a total of 28 cores and 56 threads. Almost 3 years on it’s still epic – a Ryzen Threadripper 2990X beats it but not much else does. It’s been an awesome build, but…

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Running Arch Linux on Microsoft Azure in 2019

Running Arch Linux on Microsoft Azure in 2019

So, you love Arch Linux? It’s hugely configurable, well documented, comes with a large community and it’s not remotely bloated. It makes sense that you want to share the same platform across your desktop and servers in the cloud. But, despite being one of the largest distributions, Arch isn’t supported out-the-box in a lot of cloud…

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I haven’t written a blog update in quite some time and this is going to be very different to the bulk of my content.  Nonetheless I thought it was worth writing in case anybody is trying to find information on this.  Instead of geeky tech stuff today I’ll be covering eating vegan in business and first class.

I used to fly lots, I used to drink a lot and I used to eat a lot of meat.  Over the last few years my life has changed a lot.  I spent a few years not really travelling by myself, I no longer drink alcohol and I became a vegan.  Recently my work has taken me back to flying.  I am lucky enough to always fly either first class or business.  In days gone by this was always the best bit of a trip for me – 12 hours plus a lounge to isolate with food and alcohol.

As a non-alcohol drinking vegan though, what’s the experience like?  Over the last few months I’ve flown Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class, Delta One and British Airways First.  I couldn’t find much information on any of these before I flew so thought I’d compile it here just in case any other flight-loving vegans are curious what they may expect.

 Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse – LHR

I arrived at the lounge just in time for the end of breakfast.  The Clubhouse lounge menu at LHR had everything that was vegan labelled although there wasn’t much choice.  Just one option for breakfast – porridge.  However, it was one of the creamiest bowls of porridge I’d ever had and absolutely delicious.  The recent menu sadly suggests this is no longer available but a fruit salad or grapefruit is available.  For a pre-flight snack I had a curry and a bowl of chips.  Since I flew in November 2017 it appears the menu has added some steamed edamame and warm potato salad as options.  There was also fruit available.  I mainly drank tea with soya milk which was available in the lounge.

I checked in the lounge whether there would be any soya milk on the plane (VGML had been requested) and was told no.  I asked if they could give me some from the lounge and was surprised that they refused with no further explanation.

Virgin Atlantic 787 LHR to LAX (Upper Class)

On board the food was good – I had another curry which was really tasty a fruit salad and some kind of berry compote which was actually incredibly tasty.  I had no choice with regards to what the food was but was pleasantly surprised that in a cabin of around 25 people there were at least 3 other vegans.

For snacks during the flight I mostly had bags of crisps and self-serve fruit from the bar area.  I think I single handily ate every piece of fruit that was available – so you may be stuck to crisps if you’re flying with a lot of fruit eaters.

When the afternoon snack was offered I was pleasantly surprised that there was a vegan option for me – it was an enjoyable aubergine wrap with crisps.  I wasn’t hungry by this point but enjoyed it anyway.

There was no soya milk on-board but they did have a non-alcoholic cocktail which I drank plenty of.

The staff were aware I was vegan and I wasn’t offered anything that was non-vegan.  I was actually amazingly impressed and had one of the best VS food offerings I’ve ever had with them on this flight (soya milk aside for tea).

Delta Sky Club LAX T3

Worst lounge I’ve ever used after Cancun and that’s saying something.  From a food perspective there was a self-serve salad area where you could construct something vegan and some pre-packaged options (I had tiny tortilla chips and salsa).  Nothing was labelled vegan but a scan of the ingredients made it easy enough to check.  Drinks were from a bar with standard juices and carbonated drinks available as well as tea/coffee (but no soya milk).  This lounge was an overcrowded dump that I left with an hour to spare.

Delta Domestic Flights USA – First

I flew a couple of legs on Delta – both a short-haul (<90 minute) and a medium-haul (trans-con 757).  Both had a drinks service where I mainly just drank carbonated drinks and water.  No real food options apart from crisps and some kind of wheat-based snack.  I would say the cabin crew on the 757 trans-con were amazingly good and when I mentioned I was vegan told me straight away what was and was not vegan.  Considering I hadn’t requested VGML (not an option as I was connecting) I was happy to have anything.

Delta Lounge ATL

I only had 20 minutes here before my connection but was happy to get some bread and a soup that was labelled as “Vegan Soup” (no other description).  It turned out to be a medium-spiced tomato-based soup and was pretty good.  Nothing else was labelled and it didn’t look like any other options to eat something so I crammed bread into my mouth and ate as much soup as I could.  I mainly drank carbonated drinks and water again.

Delta 747 ATL to LHR (Delta One)

Worst business class flight ever.  They didn’t load my VGML despite checking both at the lounge and at the check-in desk.  After being asked which meal I’d like and was told mine wasn’t on-board the cabin crew really weren’t helpful.  They did nothing to try to resolve it.  They continually kept offering me things and insisting it would be vegan.  Luckily we were still on the ground and as lots of it was “branded” I was able to check allergens.  Everything they proposed to me was non-vegan.  The chief purser refused to believe pesto had cheese in it.  In the end I had some fruit that was left over (but not enough to impact anybody else’s meal even if they had six courses as well), a bag of crisps and I got a few vegetables from one of the meals.  Some potatoes turned up (one mouthful proved them to also be non-vegan) and some honey-glazed veg that I couldn’t eat.

I was mainly frustrated at the absolute lack of service here.  The lady behind me was GF from allergy and couldn’t eat anything as they hadn’t got her meal.  No knowledge of what went into their food, no allergen menu on-board.  I asked and was given the “detailed” piece of paper which was utter rubbish with no detail on individual ingredients or allergens.

No breakfast option whatsoever.  I literally ate a handful of vegetables, some fruit and a bag of crisps.  At least this was a red-eye.

I got moved onto this flight (7 days earlier, so not as if no notice) from a VS flight.  I complained to VS when I got home who didn’t seem to care about either the customer service or the lack of any food options (or the late flight, the broken bag, missed connection or the other cacophony of problems).

This flight was so bad and VS’ response that I decided not to fly VS at all again for risk of this happening.  As airline I’ve used most for transatlantic flights since 2007 that’s a big step.  I found the VS outbound really good but risk of ending up on their partner airline and service like this is not something I wanted to happen again.

Avoid Delta if you’re vegan was my takeaway.

 British Airways Galleries First LHR T3

The LHR T3 First lounge isn’t the Concorde room but it’s pretty reasonable.  I arrived around breakfast time and ate a lot of hash browns, baked beans and bread for breakfast thinking that’s all I’d manage.  I contacted BA’s You First before who advised I would have bad luck in the lounge (I’m fine with that so long as I know).  I was then genuinely surprised to find 3 or 4 lunch options that were vegan (curry, tater tots and a few other pieces).  Everything was labelled for allergens as vegan.

I asked in the lounge if they could fill my bottle up with soya milk and they vanished for 10 minutes.  Turns out they’d been peeling individual servings open and pouring them in one at a time for me.  I was so grateful.

Not as swanky as the VS clubhouse but 600ml soya milk for my flight and a very full belly and I was happy.  Plenty of fruit, crisps and other nibbles available as well.  The nuts were not labelled vegan so I didn’t try them assuming them to have honey on.

British Airways First 747 LHR – PHX

I had a choice of two meals for my main meal and five courses.  I went for a curry and really enjoyed the asparagus and aubergine steak main but found a fruit platter (the second fruit course of five) a bit of a let down for desert.  The bread came with vegan spread but staff couldn’t advise which breads were vegan.  I was also given pre-flight nuts which looked as though they had honey on – again staff couldn’t confirm if vegan.  I was surprised to actually be offered soya milk on-board (only 3 single servings though in whole cabin).  The second meal was equally as good and I was ready to burst when I landed.

Overall staff were excellent with catering options here.  No non-alcoholic cocktails on the menu though so either figure out some options yourself or stick which juice, water and tea which is what I did.

  British Airways First Lounge PHX

Well there are 14 seats on board and about 20 seats in the lounge.  It was certainly cosy.  Nothing was labelled for allergens and most stuff was put out so I couldn’t even look at lists.  I ate a bag of crisps and left it at that and had a couple of diet coke’s.  It was a nice environment but I’m really glad I went to a delicious vegan junk-food restaurant 10 minutes away from the airport before coming.

Nice place to sit, not great for food.

British Airways First 747 PHX – LHR

On-board I had another good selection of food including stuffed peppers and mushroom steaks.  Sadly, the carrots and veggies on the main were inedible but the pudding with raspberries, blueberries and a dark chocolate bowl of noms was delicious.  No second option this time just what was given to me and only four courses.  Not as good as the way out by a long shot but I wasn’t left hungry.  Frankly the desert (and I’m not even a desert fan) meant I didn’t really care about the other courses.

Breakfast was a bit of a let-down – no opportunity to have something like toast, mushroom, tomato, beans and hash browns from the menu but instead I got a fruit bowl and then a fruit-compote and oat mix (kind of like warmed overnight oats).  It was alright, but I fancied a bit of a fry-up.

I was offered a lot more non-vegan food on this flight and the crew didn’t seem as good dealing with it.  I suspect (based on my interactions with crew) I was just unlucky with the person allocated to serve me as other cabin crew seemed much better… nonetheless it wasn’t as good as the outbound journey.

Overall

Well my Delta experience was so bad I won’t even touch VS now – but overall I was surprised across the board.  Plane food can be hit or miss at the best of times, let alone when you’re vegan.  I’ve been really impressed with BA who have sent me information before the flight and when I contacted them afterwards seemed genuinely thankful for the feedback.  VS just didn’t seem to care and that made it easy for me to change who I flew with.  As a revenue customer I don’t fancy sinking thousands of pounds every flight to not even know if I’ll get a meal or an apology from it.

I’d definitely recommend packing a snack just incase you don’t get a meal and eat as much as you can at the lounge but even flying out of USA proved to have some pretty decent vegan options.  The allergen requirements are not as strong ex-USA so it’s a little more risky but it seemed to be a decent selection regardless.

I’ve actually got another VS UC flight later this year that I’d already booked before making my switch for future bookings.  It’s on one of their leisure routes from LGW so lounge and service will be slightly different, it it’s significantly different I’ll update this post accordingly.  I’ve also got further BA First flights later in the year – if they’re any better or worse I’ll update as well.

The good news though – if you’re vegan and even if you don’t drink turning left is still a very nice place to be (as long as you’re not on Delta).  It’s not quite up to standard with normal meal options but the range of food is as good as any other special request meal.

Vegan Food When Flying First and Business Class (British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Delta) I haven’t written a blog update in quite some time and this is going to be very different to the bulk of my content. 

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Installing .Net Core 2 on a Raspberry Pi

I decided I wanted to get .Net Core running on my Raspberry Pi and it's really not that hard.

Recently I’ve been back experimenting with cryptocurrencies.  I was interested in whether or not I could use a Raspberry Pi to help me – in particular I wondered whether it would be of any use for CPU or hard disk mining.  To test this theory I thought I’d create my own cross-platform hard disk miner for Burstcoin.

Microsoft…

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My XFCE4 Gentoo Linux Desktop - Development, Content-Creation and Productivity Tools

My XFCE4 Gentoo Linux Desktop – Development, Content-Creation and Productivity Tools

  A few months ago I discussed whether I would be moving from Windows to another platform and the challenges that I could see myself facing in doing that.  Since then I’ve written about the technical aspects of my move to Gentoo Linux but today thought I’d look at how I’ve addressed my day-to-day workflow using a Linux workstation.A…

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Installing X.Org and XFCE on a Multi-GPU Gentoo Linux System

With three different manufacturers of GPU in a single system my X config is surprisingly fun!

Introduction

I installed Gentoo Linux back in April to replace my Windows installation.  Straight after the installation the first thing I wanted was to get X up and running so I had a desktop.  In most distributions this is super easy but there can be a few more steps involved in Gentoo.  I complicated things further by having…

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Dual Opteron Server Build in Cheapest LED ATX Case Available (CiT GForce Gaming Case)

Dual Opteron Server Build in Cheapest LED ATX Case Available (CiT GForce Gaming Case)

Introduction

Just before Christmas I found out I was going to have to move and wanted to do something with the giant pile of PC bits that was on my desk. I previously built a router and a NAS but with the clock ticking for the house move I really wanted to get a bunch of random parts put together into something a little more durable…

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Can Robotics Support Mental Health Outcomes?

Can Robotics Support Mental Health Outcomes?

Next week I have to present an academic poster on my research so far.  I am investigating how completely inanimate objects can be animated in such a way with robotics that they can be ultimately used to express emotion and help those suffering with anxiety and depression.  Rather than writing up a normal blog post I’ve recorded a…

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Installing Gentoo Linux on ZFS with NVME Drive (Part 2)

The second part of my guide on getting Gentoo up and running with ZFS is now available.

Ready for More?

If you missed it my last post was looking at how to get Gentoo Linux installed on a ZFS filesystem with NVME disks.  Due to the size of this tutorial I’ve split it into two parts and if you’re here you should definitely have read the first part of this tutorial for any of the rest of this to make sense.

Last time we…

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Installing Gentoo Linux on ZFS with NVME Drive (Part 1)

Getting Gentoo Linux online with a ZFS root and NVME disk proved a fun challenge.

Introduction

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I would be dumping Windows and making the move to Linux as my primary operating system.  I’ve now done it and as I’m writing this my PC is now running Gentoo Linux with ZFS as the operating system for my boot drive and mounted data.  This isn’t a standard configuration for Linux so I…

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X11 Sucks... So What's Up With Wayland?

I've been using X11 since 1997 and it was dated then. What does Wayland offer in 2017?

X11 Sucks

Thirty years ago, it was 1987.  The US stock market crashed, there was a fire at King’s Cross station in London killing 31 people, the first Final Fantasy game was released for NES, the USA had 75 million fewer inhabitants than it does today, Disney agreed to open a theme park in Paris, the world’s population was 2.5…

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Being a Software Developer Sucks!

I quit being a software developer after almost 20 years and here is why I think it sucks.

My Background

From a very young age I discovered my love of tinkering with electronics and a fascination with computers grew.  By the time I was seven I had my first computer, a Commodore 64, and started to code.  The first programme I ever wrote simply asked for my name and then responded, “Hi Guy, how are you today?”.  Despite the…

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Switching From Windows 10 - But To What?

I'm switching from Windows but can FreeBSD really work as my main OS?

Some Background

Over the years I have used a great many operating systems.  When considering a desktop operating system my needs have almost always been driven by which platform I was currently developing for.  Not only are developer toolsets better on the platforms they are intended for but it helps to be fully familiar with a…

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BitFenix Prodigy M, Virtual Routers and More...

BitFenix Prodigy M, Virtual Routers and More…

    It’s been a while since I posted an updated on my blog.  Since the new year life has been a little hectic.  I think I managed to forget how much work was actually involved in exam season at universities and the workload this semester along with family-life and trying to finish a software project I’ve been working on as well has certainly kept me a little busy.  I haven’t had much time…

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VMware ESXi 6.5 Setup for Virtualized FreeNAS 9 Installation

VMware ESXi 6.5 Setup for Virtualized FreeNAS 9 Installation

Just a quick post today.  Last week I wrote in detail about the NAS that I setup at the start of the year.  It’s been a really fun project – in particular getting FreeNAS running smoothe and stable in a virtual machine using hardware pass-through.

As promised last week I’ve created some detailed videos that look at how to get a fresh ESXi 6.5 installation ready for my hardware (including…

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The Annual NAS Challenge

For some reason I like to build large storage arrays.  I do tend to eat up a lot of storage and over time I’ve filled them up.  For the last couple of years I’ve gone big and in 2016 I decided to just buy an off the shelf Drobo 5N filled with 5x 4TB SATA drives.  It’s fine but there have been a few issues with it – the lack of active directory integration means I cannot securely use it to store virtual machine disk images for Hyper V Server and a lack of iSCSI and slightly lack-lustre out the box NFS implementation has left me with the same problem for VMWare ESXi virtual machines.  I’ve ended up just using it to store all my old backups and ISOs but don’t feel I’m getting the most out of it.

I had some old parts sat around that I shared on Facebook a while ago – motherboards, CPUs, RAM and a lot of disks.  Amongst them were 4x 4TB matched SAS drives and a SAS HBA I had used on a project a couple of years ago.  At that time I was working on a NAS that I never quite felt happy with and then personal issues meant I had to leave it in an undesired state.  Most of it got torn down but a few bits remained so this year is mostly a rebuild of a NAS from the past but with a clear intention on stability and performance – at least matching my Drobo 5N when it comes to network speed.

The last NAS had a number of issues:

Trying to get everything in to a 2U case proved extremely loud and messy

Consumer grade hardware posed issues with OpenIndiana, switched to FreeBSD

iSCSI stability issues – regularly lag spikes

Speed never ended up particularly high

Significant management overhead just to keep it running

I did however really enjoy working with ZFS and found iSCSI worked wonderfully for my virtualization needs.  With a focus on backing virtual machines for my projects and learning from this build in the past this year’s requirements are:

iSCSI protocol

SMB with Active Directory integration

At least 100MBps sustained speed for an iSCSI read or write operation

Potential for link aggregation

ZFS implementation

Rapidly upgradeable NAS operating system

Low management overhead

Needs to look good and remain quiet on my desk as this won’t be in a data centre or rack mounted in my garage

A Virtual Solution

To meet my requirements the first thing I decided on way to go with an out-of-the-box FreeNAS installation.  It handles iSCSI and ZFS but prevents me needing to look and manage everything under the hood if I don’t want to.  It also comes with pretty good (apart from web authentication) integration with Active Directory which means it will be easy for me to setup and manage for iSCSI and SMB without installing a tonne of extra software.  Having played with FreeNAS 9 and the beta of 10 during testing I decided to stick with the latest stable release of FreeNAS 9.  I had a bunch of issues with the web interface and even the boot loader on FreeNAS 10.  Whilst I think 10 is a landmark shift away from the issues I’ve always had with previous versions of FreeNAS it’s definitely not there for daily use yet.

The next big decision was how to manage upgrades.  Knowing the issues I had testing FreeNAS what I didn’t want was to make a decision to upgrade FreeNAS at some point, or switch to another ZFS-based operating system, and end up with my NAS and consequentially virtual machines unavailable for a whole week.  The solution – virtualising my NAS and using a bare metal hypervisor as the actual underlying operating system on the hardware.

Running FreeNAS in a virtual machine works and is supported but there are a few caveats – the main being that any disk which FreeNAS itself is sharing out needs to be as close to the physical hardware as possible.  Creating a physical RAID array, having the RAID adapter setup in the hypervisor and then creating several disks for ZFS to be configured on in a FreeNAS virtual machine is the worst possible thing you can do.  All the optimisations that ZFS does are negated but underlying technologies and it becomes a worst-of-all scenario.

I decided to go with VMWare ESXi 6.5 as my hypervisor.  I’ve used 5.5 a lot and wanted to try the new version.  I did consider Hyper V Server 2016 and gave it some testing but found a few limitations that frustrated me and decided (other than my desktop PC) I would stick to VMWare across all my virtualisations.

Using ESXI 6.5 left me with a simple solution.  The 4TB SAS disks that will form my storage array are connected to a HBA which can, in turn, be directly passed through to the virtual machine.  This makes my LSI SAS2008 card appear to FreeNAS as if it is installed locally.  Because the card is where the disks are connected to VMWare never even sees the 4TB disks.  The HBA itself is one I used a couple of years ago and blogged about at the time to make sure it just presents disks and does not RAID on top of them (note even JBOD).  Passing through the HBA required enabling IOMMU in the motherboard and selecting the device in VMWare as a pass-through device.  The mother board also has eSATA ports that I passed through even though I am not using them at this point.

For the FreeNAS boot disks I use SSDs.  Unfortunately, I cannot pass these through and nor is there any underlying RAID on them.  To give me some stability here I have two separate SSDs.  I have created a virtual disk on each of these which are then configured in a ZFS mirror for the FreeNAS boot drive.  Whilst this is not as ideal as having them directly passed through to VMWare it does mean that I have a mirror for protection against single drive failure and performance on them will be more than adequate to boot with.  I also didn’t want to pass these through as I’d then lose some of the advantage of hot-swapping the underlying operating system unless I kept adding disks.

This virtualised solution means that I can configure FreeNAS with 16GB of RAM and 6 cores which will be fine for my daily use and then create a second VM with everything other than the PCI Express pass-through enabled.  I can then get everything working and ready for migration.  If I want to then switch to a different underlying operating system for my NAS I just shut down the initial VM, attach the PCI Express HBA to the new VM, start it up and import the ZFS volumes – this entire process will take a couple of minutes and can be dry-run through first.  I am sacrificing some RAM here to FreeNAS but for my use case I think the versatility is better.

To complete this built I’m going to be using the hardware I have listed here.  This includes a 6-core processor, 32GB RAM, an Intel quad gigabit NIC, a GTX 460 graphics card and most importantly an Aerocool DS200 case in fluorescent orange.  I’d love to say I selected the case for the number of disk bays and noise dampening that it provides but the truth of it is I loved just how orange it is.  I did a separate review of the case recently – it isn’t amazing but it is orange and works well for my purposes.

The Build

The build is detailed in full in the video at the top of this post and there will also be separate videos coming up showing how I configured FreeNAS and ESXi to enable this configure in full.  Rather than rehashing everything here it all went pretty well though apart from a few issues that did crop up.

I started by almost bricking my SAS HBA.  When swapping from a low-profile to full-sized bracket I got annoyed at a screw, removed its thread and almost snapped the PCB whilst trying to remove it.  Thankfully everything still worked.  Don’t get mad at your HBAs folks, it rarely ends well.  There were a few issues with cable management – namely how little space this case provides behind the motherboard tray – and the graphics card makes more noisy than I’d like (but it does have an orange fan), however the physical build was fine other than these minor issues.

During the install of ESXI 6.5 I had a bunch of issues that I’d not encountered before.  The first was with keyboards – a selection of modern gaming keyboards I had would not work once ESXi’s installer booted at all.  I ended up using a late 1990s Sun Microsystems vintage keyboard I had lying around which seemed fine.  I guess this is the first time I’ve tried ESXi with a consumer keyboard (rather than a basic Dell one in a rack) and didn’t spend much time investigating but something to look out for – no BIOS setting changes got anything working here.

The other really annoying thing with ESXi was its desire to not play ball with a USB-stick installation.  One of the reasons I had selected ESXi over Hyper-V was so that I could install it on a USB stick.  Many USB sticks were just not detected by the installer or would not partition – even one that I’d got ESXi 5.5 installed on.  I eventually got it working on a USB stick I didn’t really want to use (it was a small collapsible one prone to falling out of machines) when eventually it started giving random errors during reboots.  At this point I gave in and went with just using a small amount of SSD space on one of the datastore drives.  I never got to the bottom of this, some of the drives could be fakes but I doubt all of them are – it’s more likely an issue between the consumer board and ESXi.  I was able to work around this using SSD but never addressed the underlying issue.  If you have this and must install on a USB stick my recommendation would be install ESXi as a VM in Windows (through VMWare Player) and then take that disk image and burn it to a USB stick (this also works for Hyper-V).

The final issue was the motherboard’s on-board Realtek network interface.  The RTL8110 is no longer supported by VMware in ESXi 6.5.  Whilst I had a separate Intel quad gigabit NIC (which worked perfectly) I wanted to use the Realtek one for management traffic and reserve the Intel card for iSCSI.  To work around this you can install the other drivers from VMWare 5.  This does work but is not supported.  You can either merge these in to your ESXi 6.5 image before you start or do it via the other working cards afterwards (which is what I did).

To get your Realtek card working with ESXi 6.5 follow these steps:

Download the drivers from http://vibsdepot.v-front.de/depot/RTL/net55-r8168/net55-r8168-8.039.01-napi.x86_64.vib and upload to your datastore (we’ll refer to its name a DatastoreName below)

Enable SSH on the host

SSH in as root to the host

Type in the following two commands:

esxicli software acceptance set -level=CommunitySupported

esxcli software vib install /vmfs/volumes/DatastoreName/net55-r8168-8.039.01-napi.x86_64.vib

Reboot your host

This should all work magically – but a couple of caveats:

The first time I did this my Realtek NIC appeared but I lost the Intel ports. I never could get them back.  They were detected and had a driver loaded but never mapped to an interface and no errors in any logs.  A reinstallation worked fine.

Some people have repeated other odd errors – including the card running for months, freezing up and then working fine after a reboot. I wouldn’t use this port for anything production-worthy.

And with that the 2017 16TB NAS is ready for action.

Performance

I tested numerous configurations with both iSCSI and SMB.  I ran drive configurations including two-parity disk RAIDZ2 (ZFS’ version of RAID 6), single-parity disk RAIDZ (ZFS’ version of RAID 5) and mirrored stripe and just striped configurations (ZFS’ versions of RAID 10 and RAID 0).  I ran all these tests with the default synchronous write policy and compression disabled.  I separately ran some compression tests and found a very small fluctuation in speeds with anything up to default levels of gzip compression (highest gzip did drop around 10MBps of transfer).  I also ran tests to see if ZIL disks or additional RAM would significantly change performance figures – they didn’t.

From the main results it became obvious really early on that iSCSI out performed SMB but it had some odd issues including speeds peaking and then dropping significantly before peaking again.  I was able to get 102.32MBps out of my tests (which did beat the Drobo 5N) but I wasn’t happy with the lag spikes – these can be fatal when you want low-latency for virtual machines.

I then did something many people would consider bad – I swapped to an asynchronous write policy.  This definitely increases risk in your storage solution (a sudden power loss and I’ve potentially corrupted the disks far more than I otherwise would) and I would not recommend it in production unless you can take other precautions (keeping replicas, backups, and a stable UPS with graceful ZFS shutdown would be musts).  That being said, I am not in a production system and the results smoothed out and gave me a big performance boost.

Switching as async writes with RAID Z over iSCSI gave me a whopping 125MBps – completely maxing out the gigabit Ethernet.  Whilst I haven’t tested the impact of link aggregation yet I did do a test from another VM within the same host (in effect removing the NICs limitations).  This was able to pull down more than 250MBps (2.5Gbps over the network) – and that was sat on top of a virtual disk in a datastore on top of the iSCSI itself.

I’m really happy with this NAS – it looks great, it’s quiet and I can happily get a 26% performance increase over my off-the-shelf Drobo 5N with a lot more versatility.  Whilst these parts could cost a lot if purchased new everything other than disks could easily beat the price of a Drobo 5N if purchased second hand and there’s scope for many more disks and configurations here plus a fairly low power drag (I notice around 100W at the moment).

I’ll be doing some posts on the ESXi and FreeNAS configurations that I’ve used shortly but for now enjoy the video above which includes all the benchmarks and shows off the build a little more.

cof

cof

mde

sdr

With a new year comes a new NAS - check out my 2017 16TB build. Did I mention... it's orange? The Annual NAS Challenge For some reason I like to build large storage arrays.  I do tend to eat up a lot of storage and over time I’ve filled them up. 

[guyrobottv]

Coding Security Camera Monitoring Software – Part 3

The final part of my blog post on how to monitor your CCTV cameras with custom code is here...

Introduction

This is the last in my three-part look at how to write your own security camera monitoring software (see part 1 and part 2 here if you missed them).  I have CCTV around my house and wanted something easy to watch the feeds on without needing to install anything or to pay for software.  I wanted it to just sit on a spare…