Homelab: SmartOS Lenovo TS140 build

Today I received the final component to complete my first homelab-specific PC build.

Here’s the final spec sheet:

• Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 chassis
• Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 3.2GHz
• 32GB (4x8GB) Crucial ECC DDR3-1600
• Western Digital Red 1TB 7200rpm (3)
• Intel I340-T4 (PCIE 2.0 x 4 lane, 4x1Gb NIC)

The motherboard in this unit supports Intel AMT for lights-out management on the on-board NIC.

I’ve installed Joyent’s SDC, an enhanced, yet still open-source version of SmartOS. This OS supports ZFS for storage, KVM virtualization, as well as lighter-weight virtualization based on Solaris zones that supports Linux via “LX-branded” zones. It offers API-driven image and VM/zone creation, and will soon host a number of Linux VMs for my home use.

Both the on-board and the additional PCI-Express Intel NIC are supported, and I’ve configured the 4-port NIC to be collected under non-LACP link aggegration (neither active nor passive), and set this NIC as my external adapter while the on-board NIC is the admin adapter. The admin adapter is used, among other things, for PXE booting additional compute nodes. So far, this DHCP server has not conflicted with my home router, despite not being physically isolated or configured to use a VLAN.

Installation of SmartOS and later SDC was straightforward - simply flash an image to a USB drive and boot from it - but initially I was missing one crucial option. I needed to include variable os_console vga in the boot commands in order to have viable keyboard input on a local console during the setup. My 3 SATA drives were automatically recognized and configured in a RAIDZ-1 arrangement for parity that allows for the loss of any one drive without data loss. This is a fully-destructive operation, but I had originally used these 3 drives in a FreeNAS build prior to this and had nothing of value left on them.

Under vanilla SmartOS, I was shutting the unit down and re-flashing the USB to upgrade to a new image, but since switching to the SDC distribution, I can do this remotely and online via sdcadm. Since new releases come out every other Thursday, I’m relieved to have a simpler option, as the USB drive I’m using is a tiny form factor with roughly 2MB/sec sustained write speeds.

The learning curve for Solaris/SmartOS commands has been a little steep, but this guide has been invaluable. I’ve also added pkgin to the global zone so that I could install tmux.