Backups...

[Sasayaki]

Okay, so I'm getting a little paranoid about my backups since I lost some data recently, and I'd love to hear community feedback on this.

My new FreeNAS build is a FreeNAS Mini, with 4x WD Red 4tb 3.5" drives in RAID Z, along with 2x WD Red 1tb 2.5" drives also in the same box, doing nightly replications of important data.

However, that's probably not enough as it's all in one place (I lost data before by being dumb and doing a dumb thing; that's the main thing I need to protect against, myself).

Accordingly, I was going to set up an ESXi box using a second box running ESXi. Technically, it's another FreeNAS Mini, but obviously running ESXi instead as it has other functions. It'll have 2x WD Red 3tb 3.5" drives, along with a 2.5" 120gb SSD I have laying around, and it will run a variety of OS's.

Now, I know there are big red Cyberjock-enforced recommendations about not running FreeNAS inside a virtual environment for any reason except education, experimentation, testing, or suicide. Accordingly, what should I run? What's the best thing for FreeNAS to automatically back up to? (these backups would probably be done by RSync or similar technology).

Is FreeNAS safe to run virtualised if all it's doing is backing up nightly copies, or should I use something else? Any recommendations? I'd prefer something very simple if possible.

Any suggestions welcome!

 

[Ericloewe]

When virtualizing, the main requirement is giving FreeNAS its own hardware.

This means you must dedicate a suitable amount of memory (fortunately for you, once 16GB DIMMs are available you should be able to upgrade to 64GB on that motherboard) that will always be reserved for FreeNAS. You must also pass-through the disk controller (in your case, this most likely means the potentially flaky Marvell controllers - I still haven't gotten an answer regarding their stability) and, ideally, the NIC (you have two Intel i210s, so one of them dedicated to FreeNAS sounds reasonable).

 

[Sasayaki]

Ah. This particular board doesn't support passthrough at all.

I would have imagined virtualised NICs to be fine. I can imagine there being problems with virtualised controllers.

If not FreeNAS, then, any suggestions? Something FreeNAS will work well with.

 

[cyberjock]

Hehe. It's not really enforced by me. In fact, I'm not the one that despises it the most. There's another individual that won't even consider posting, no matter what, as soon as you mention virtualization.

To be honest, if you plan to virtualize FreeNAS, then your backups shouldn't be virtualized(or vice versa). You don't need some software bug to be responsible for losing your primary AND backup pools. In your case, you have a Mini so you satisfy this recommendation.

But, if you can't do PCI passthrough you are definitely done.

 

[dtemp]

Is FreeNAS safe to run virtualised if all it's doing is backing up nightly copies, or should I use something else? Any recommendations? I'd prefer something very simple if possible.

Any suggestions welcome!

If you are using a nice, reliable, supported solution for your main storage like the Mini, then maybe you can take some risks (and do some learning) with an entirely separate backup server. You are correct that backing up to a different disk/array/pool on the same server won't protect you against many of the causes that can require one to need a backup.

Check out the specs in my signature. It wasn't exactly cheap, but it seems to tick all of the bullet points as far as virtualizing FreeNAS as safely as possible goes. The parts are easy enough to find on Newegg/Amazon, except the RAM, because of the short validated memory list; I got mine here. I've had this rig up 2 weeks, and I guess so far so good. I'm doing the reverse as you: I'm using virtualization for my main storage, and bare-metal for backup.

Don't underestimate the amount of learning you're going to have to do, if you are new to a lot of the topics you're going to be broaching (FreeNAS administration, ESXi administration, server building, learning CLI, etc). Literally all I did for like 15 days of the month before I pulled the trigger and bought the parts was browse forum posts and reddit threads and read PDFs in preparation (girlfriend wasn't impressed). After the parts arrived, it was another whirl-wind of learning, having to open 50 browser tabs to do almost anything.