X-Case X465E First Impressions

My current server lives in a ThermalTake Core X9 case. While I like it a lot, and its generous dimensions have allowed me add lots of PCIe cards,  its proving itself to be somewhat toasty, especially for drives which are often reporting high temperatures.

The system lives in an attic space that heats up over summer which does not help with thermals. The unwieldy size and din generated by multiple fans makes moving location somewhat tricky.

For the past few weeks, I've been toying with the idea of slimming down and going for a rack mount setup. In this mindset, I came across the X-Case X456E from xcase.co.uk. This is touted as a 12 slot 4U rackmount server case. This piqued my interest as the extra PCI slot capacity is something that I'd modded in to my current case, and here it was, out of the box.

This trick is achieved by moving the PSU to the front of the case. The compromise here is a reduction in hard drive capacity (8x 3.5"). However, happy to live with this and use a second chassis for any additional drives, I went ahead and bought one.

There were a few obvious improvements to be made which I documented in this first impressions video;

MediaServer 8.3 - Bifurcation Edition

Some hardware updates, some minor mods and lots of cabling later, I've managed to get my unRAID server hosting eleven (13?) usable PCIe/PCI expansion cards which I'm using to manage storage devices and populate VMs with passthrough GPU, USB and Utility adapters.

All with 2x slots to spare on my 5x slot mainboard.

Here's how...

unRAID discrete USB Passthrough to multiple VMs

For a while, I've been working towards consolidation of machines into VMs on my unRAID system.  unRAID is great for this as it allows for hardware passthrough of devices such as GPUs, USB adapters and other items. Passthrough of discrete USB controllers is especially important. unRAID does allow direct device passthrough, but I've found this unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Mainly, it's not a great solution for high-bandwidth devices such as audio cards. Also, it's not really plug'n'play, with hot swapping being somewhat patchy.

Passthrough of the full controller solves these problems, One of the challenges of this approach is however, physical capacity for discrete devices. With each VM requiring a PCIe GPU and a USB adapter, it's possible to run out of slots fairly quickly. Yes, it's possible to use on-board controllers, but that's not always a full solution and PCIe cards are often required in addition.

Another approach is to use multi-controller PCIe USB adapters. These are cards the occupy a single slot, provide multiple ports and. crucially, have multiple on-board USB controllers that would, in theory, permit each controller to be passed through to a separate VM.

One such card is the Sonnet Allegro USB3-PRO-4PM-E, sadly now discontinued. There are alternatives, but as users in this thread are finding out, broad compatibility is patchy.

As an alternative, I've been using a PCIe expansion kit to pass through discrete controllers to VMs. These devices were all the rage during the mining boom as they allowed users attach multiple GPUs to a single PCIe slot in order to leverage compute power. They work by essentially switching multiple PCIe ports through a single 1x motherboard port. Although the device sports four 16x mechanical slots, each is in itself only a 1x slot - but that's all that's needed for a USB controller.

Routing VMs anywhere

I'll start my saying that these things are freaking amazing!

I've been running a few VMs on my unRaid box for a while now. Specifically my main workstation (Win10 /OSX switchable), as well as some utility boxes.

One of the challenges has been physical location and signal transfer - my unRaid server resides in my attic and any VMs that required an interface (display & USB), would need to be located within the reach of a HDMI run.

This ruled out virtualising some systems, including a Win 10 / OSX dual boot hackintosh that's the main system the family uses. It's miles away from the server with no hope of running cables.

I'd toyed with HDMI over ethernet before, with little success. Recently, however, I came across the Av Access range of products...

Performance Test Metrics

One of the principal negatives I've been reading about Storage Spaces is the poor performance of parity-protected volumes. Having used UnRaid for some time, I'm quite used to the performance limitations of parity-protection and am quite happy to live with this in my use case (serving media files) as it's mostly about reading data and the benefits of parity protection in terms of maximising disk space usage and resilience are important factors to me.

However, I'm interested in the performance I'm getting and finding ways of improving access speeds and so have conducted some tests to benchmark the current system and have a way of determining the efficacy of any future improvements.

Why Server 8?

A couple of years ago, I'd tried out Windows Home Server (WHS) and used it in a similar configuration to that proposed (single multi-function box to manage data storage and playback).

I liked it at the time and the main reason I moved away from it (to unRaid) was because it could not be easily configured to store OSX Time Machine backups. (UnRaid offers this capability through full AFP support).

The release of Windows 8 consumer preview caught my attention with the addition of the Storage Spaces feature. Reading on this led me to Server 8 Beta and the additional features such as ReFS etc.

The main reasons for considering server at this time are;

• Robust OS for maximum uptime
• Storage Spaces Support
• Hyper-V architecture facilitating compartimisation (and stability of core system)
• Windows versions of all apps and drivers for hardware I intend using are available
• Extensive system reporting facilities

It's likely that even if this all works, cost will become a factor when Server 8 is eventually released. Will I be willing to fork out €600 or more?

Maybe an updated version of WHS will be announced but in any case, it's a consideration for the future.

One Box To Rule Them All

What's this all about then?

With the release of Windows Server 8 Beta, I'm interested in testing the viability of consolidating a number of currently discrete domestic systems onto the platform for the purposes of establishing a stable, unified whole-house media storage and playback system.

I intend to use this blog to document ideas, procedures, problems and solutions along the way. If nothing else, it will allow me collate all those links and articles I come across along the way. Maybe it will help someone somewhere. If it does, let me know by commenting!