Old server dying, jumping on the virtual train

Hi,

my old 2010 Mac Mini (don't laugh) i7 / CentOS is starting to show signs of age and I don't expect it to last the year. I plan to replace it (and in the future my current 4-bay DiskStation) with an 6-8 Bay all in one machine with ESXi / ProxMox, one VM for Plex, one VM for FreeNAS, room for future experiments.

I've been reading through tons of information here and on ServeTheHome and I think I'm starting to get a grasp on the basics. I both wanted to see how much I'm wrong as well as asking a few questions I couldn't figure out with my Google Fu.

I'm not a fan of used hardware, it feels like every time I gave in I got the short end of the stick so most stuff except the IBM HBA I'm probably buying new. And as you've probably already read a thousand times over I'm aiming at sort-of-low power consumption, at least when idle. This post from Brian Moses started the journey.

I'm still undecided between a Xeon-D 1528 and a Xeon E3 12xx build - Atom C2xxx is not enough oomph and Core i3 is too close to the E3 in price (150 Core i3 6100 vs 225 for E3 v6 1225). I'll keep digging through forum posts, though. I'll look at prebuilt servers again, but so far I've decided on a SuperMicro board and putting things together myself.

Here's the stuff I couldn't figure out or would be super happy to get confirmation on:

• for FreeNAS I need an HBA controller and it seems the ServeRAID m1015 is most recommended. I couldn't find if the Broadcom 3008 from the X11SSH-CTF is supported - probably not?
• most Xeon-D motherboards are missing active cooling and from what I gathered this is because 1U cases have better airflow. I'm looking at a small tower, something with at least 6 3.5" + 1 2.5". The Lian Li PC-Q25 looked decent enough but I assume I still need the active cooling?
• when going for an E3-12xx I couldn't find too many reasons to go with the 12x5 series to get integrated graphics - except it's not a lot of money extra and h265 encoding/decoding sounds more future proof to me
• any obvious drawbacks that I'm missing for going with the Broadwell generation Xeon-D instead of a new Kaby Lake E3?
• I couldn't find any information if there is any way (or if it even makes sense) to control case fans based on temperature. The case I was looking at for the E3, FD Define Mini has a manual fan control, but it would be great if the thing just increased airflow if temperature increased.

That's all I can think of for now, any feedback is appreciated. I understand that it all depends on personal needs, but maybe I'm missing obvious knowledge (never heard of Xeon-D or VT-d before I started digging) or some obvious vendor I should look at (never heard of SuperMicro before).

P.S. sorry wall of text, not good at formatting in reddit :-O

--- EDIT 6/21 ---

Thanks again for all the kind help! After puzzling the Mini apart and back together I managed to keep it around 95° at heavy load with new thermal paste. Based on what I saw online this seems to be the norm and it's way better than before - no more throttling and complains in the log.

Here's what I put together in case the repair wouldn't have worked in case it's of interest to anybody (doubt it, but who knows):

• Supermicro X11SSL-CF: on-board SAS controller for FreeNAS & SM is apparently awesome
• Xeon E3-1230v6 or Xeon E3-1245v6: 1230 is the first that offers Hyper Threading, just 20 bucks more for a little more oomph and onboard GPU
• Fractal Design Define Mini: looked small and nice enough and has enough space for HDDs + space for coolers. Not sure if there's anything better out there, but it seemed to fit the bill
• 360 Watt Seasonic G Serie 360: good efficiency even with 10% load, unfortunately non-modular
• 8GB Crucial CT8G4WFS824A DDR4-2400 ECC DIMM CL17 Single: planned on 32gb max and wanted to start with 16gb. Couldn't find enough tests which vendor to choose, but never heard anything bad about Crucial and it was middle-of-the-road price-wise.

To give me something new to play with I at least moved the Mac Mini to ProxMox and the server from CentOS to Debian 9. I'm using rclone to backup stuff to the cloud and for whatever reason CentOS ran into trouble gathering all local files, MacOS and debian are fine. Probably some mistake on my part, but couldn't figure out what. ProxMox all the things!

Cheers