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I plan on building a home server which will do NAS as its main purpose, using the Supermicro Superserver 6027R-3RF4+ (for starters with 1 CPU - Xeon E5-2620 + 4x16GB ECC Registered RAM). I know its very powerful and maybe too much, but for the price of a redundant PSU and a Xeon E3 (only 400$ less), I'd rather get this instead for expandibility.

Since it's a little too powerful for "only" doing a NAS I though I may as well use it for virtualization (thanks to up to 384GB of ECC RAM - 768GB theoretically but I'm using 16GB sticks and not 32GB sticks).

For the NAS part I planned to go the FreeBSD route: it's quite well documented, maybe I can even have a gui (ZFSGuru) - though it may not be necessary, free to use and supports ZFS with encryption (using GELI for instance).

Therefore if I go a FreeBSD over bare-metal I think that leaves:

  • Virtualbox (maybe with PhpVirtualbox to control it)
  • FreeBSD Jails (only for FreeBSD virtualization)

I'd like to hear your opinion on hypervisor-based virtualization. Since I plan to use (far) more than 32GB of RAM, VMWare ESXi (free) is not an option. The pro version is too pricey for me. Not sure if I can (safely) pass all my HDDs through directly to the NAS VM. This way I think my data would be safer. That would leave:

  • Xenserver (free)
  • XCP (open source, though seems a bit outdated and buggy)
  • (Linux OS as host) + Xen/KVM + Virtualmin/Cloudmin
  • (Linux OS as host) + Xen/KVM + Convirture
  • (Linux OS as host) + Xen/KVM/OpenVZ + (Custum made panel)

I'd like to hear your opinions and experiences. If possible I'd like a more "serious" virtualization solution than Virtualbox, though I'd like to avoid losing / corrupting data on the NAS because I added a virtualization layer.

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Hello User51166, welcome to SU. This site is for finding answers to technical issues you face, whereas your question appears to be inviting a discussion, and so would be better placed on a forum. – Paul Jul 30 '12 at 7:05
@Paul: probably you're right. Still I find the community here at superuser helps me more than most forums. If I may reformulate my question: "What solutions are there to do both NAS (using FreeBSD) and virtualization in a reliable way?" – user51166 Jul 30 '12 at 7:08
Your question is indeed a little localized to your situation – and it's hard to even see the actual question. I'll leave it to the community to decide – but note that you can always ask for personal advice on Super User Chat, if there's someone around who's knowledgeable enough. – slhck♦ Jul 30 '12 at 9:56
@slhck: thank you for the suggestion. Didn't know there was a chat on Super User. Good to know this. – user51166 Jul 30 '12 at 10:47
@slhck: chatrooms about this topic are more likely in the serverfault channel, still reading their FAQ they don't permit home server questions. That's why I posted this on SuperUser, still I don't seem to find a good chat room. Maybe on unix.stackexchange.com then ... – user51166 Jul 30 '12 at 10:54

closed as not a real question by Paul, Journeyman Geek, Joe Taylor, Diogo, Nifle Jul 31 '12 at 10:06

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.