Run plug-ins in a jail or in a separate server?

[Tufkab]

I'm still in the planning stages, but I'd like some input before I go out and start buying more hardware.

I've done some searching, but I've not really found anybody asking this question before.

A little background on what my goals are. I plan on having 8x3tb drives in z1 with an online hot spare. I want to run Plex, transmission, sickbeard, couch potato and crash plan. I want to have a central location to house all of my media and a place where every computer in the house can back up to. There's 6 windows machines and one Mac in the house. I'm still looking into the pro/con of giving each machine it's own CIFS share or using iSCSI. Running an Asterix based pbx is also a possibility in the future.

But to address my original question. I'm torn between installing a bunch of plug-ins and letting my freenas box become a jack of all trades or letting it be the master of one; let it do what it was built to do and manage storage. I have a few spare h87 boards and an i3 4130 or i5 4440 that I can use to build a Debian box that would host all the services that I might run on freenas.

Also, for the freenas box, I was planning on using the i3 that I already have, picking up a board that does ECC ram and using that; but I just found a guy locally selling an Hp z400 workstation. The specs on it are xeon w3565, 3.2 GHz quad core, 24 gig ddr3 ecc ram and it includes an lsi sas2 2008 falcon card. The guy is asking $350 for it. I'm probably going to assume that most people around here would suggest that I use the older, but enterprise grade hardware?

I'll be connecting the freenas box to my network via 10 gig Ethernet and if I do a second server, that would have a 10gbe connection to the switch as well. The router is a pfsense box running on an i3 4130 in a CHEAP, ASUS consumer grade board with a basic supemicro dual port Intel nic.

Thoughts, opinions, criticisms?

 

[Nick2253]

Couple things:

First, you should rethink your use of RAIDZ1. The classic article is ZDNet - Why RAID 5 Stops Working in 2009. Most storage vendors have also released advisories against single-parity volumes.

On the iSCSI issue, I would strongly recommend going with a CIFS share. FreeNAS is going to do a much better job managing the disks than Windows/OSX will. I would only consider iSCSI for dedicated hypervisor storage, and only if NFS won't work.

As far as plugins go, there's two schools of thought: first, what is the relationship between the plugin and the data? In other words, is the data required to make the plugin work? For the plugins you've listed, I'd probably say yes. And if it's required, then it should be bundled together. Why maintain two separate systems, when you can't separate their functionality? I'm of this view for my personal stuff. I personally don't have a ton of time to devote to my personal IT, so I'd rather not spend my time doing a bunch of maintenance tasks.

The second school says that storage should be completely stand alone, primarily because it is super, incredibly critical, and you don't want to introduce additional complexity (which can introduce additional failure modes). From that view, yes, you should separate. I'm of this view for work stuff: downtime is now a huge business cost, and storage is generally more important than anything one thing that uses that storage.

As far as hardware goes, the W3565 is pretty old, so it's not going to be as fast as it looks, and it's going to suck a lot of power. As far as recommendations go, I will always recommend enterprise hardware (the i3 I consider enterprise) over non-enterprise, and within enterprise, I'll recommend newer over older.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

you should rethink your use of RAIDZ1

Definitely. RAIDZ1 with a hot spare seems silly when you can do RAIDZ2.

As far as separation of plugins and storage, I'm very much in favor. I moved Plex from my FreeNAS box to my HTPC (Mac mini) and find it much easier to manage and keep updated, and it's no longer competing with ZFS for resources. The content is still on FreeNAS, visible to the mini via an NFS share (it helps that NFS is built into OS X). I put anything I want to run on the FreeNAS box in an Ubuntu Server VM using the VirtualBox jail.

 

[Jailer]

Ultimately your skill level will probably be the deciding factor on whether to use a separate box or run it all on FreeNAS. Having a GUI with all the management tools such as FreeNAS has makes managing jails and their backups, snapshots, cron jobs etc a lot easier than doing the same on a separate box. Plus if your separate box runs Debian you'll lose all that ZFS has to offer.

I have to admit since discovering FreeNAS and subsequently FreeBSD I think jails are the greatest thing since sliced bread so my opinion on the matter is a bit jaded.

Just my .02

 

[DrKK]

8x3TB on RAID-Z1 is completely insane, and I just want to point, *I* am usually the guy that is more willing to go for RAID-Z1, and *I* am telling you it's insane.

 

[brando56894]

I've been trying to figure out my perfect solution for the past nine months also. Originally I had plugins for plex/nzbget/sickrage/couchpotato/transmission in separate jails but that became a major pain to manage so I put everything except Plex in a basic FreeBSD jail which worked well. If you have a lot of exports to connect to your jail it can get pretty damn confusing on what goes where, especially if you use the same directory heirarchy in the pools and in the jail.

I then started my foray into creating a webserver and created a jail for my webserver but didn't like how some of the ports/packages were pretty old (I'm used to using Arch Linux which is bleeding edge) so after messing with that for months, I decided to do Arch in a VM and put all the usenet and webserver stuff in there. I'm not sure if I like the performance or not, also by putting everything in a VM (except for my temp download storage and multimedia storage, they're mounted via NFS) I lose the benefit of ZFS as it only sees the whole OS as a 100 GB file. I was actually debating on getting a HardKernel Odroid XU4 (Samsung Exynos 5 series, A16/A7 big.LITTLE config @ 2 GHz; 2 GB RAM) and setting all my storage up over NFS to retain the benefits of ZFS while not putting a load on my FreeNAS CPU.

 

[Tufkab]

Thanks for the replies.

I had already read that article on RAID5 from ZDNET. I found it a little too "the sky is falling". The author makes some silly assumptions and does go out on a bit of a limb; but I do get the point of what he's saying. That said, I do agree that considering Z1 with a hot spare is pretty silly when I could just run Z2; not quite sure what I was thinking there.

My issue with hardware is this: I'm in Canada. Shipping here is already bad enough, but the current exchange rate makes matters even worse. For example, a Supermicro X10SLL board, after tax and shipping will set me back just shy of $250. But it is what it is, and I'll have to make for the cost of new hardware by sourcing whatever I can locally from Kijiji (like Craigslist, but better). I got my i3 4130 CPU for $50 and picked up a used Supermicro 833 series 3u case for $75, including rails. Plus, when I'm about to spend $1400 on hard drives, an extra $1oo on a mobo isn't all that bad.

As far as my skill level...I'd consider to be fairly proficient. my experience in the Unix/Linux world is rather limited, but I have no problem with learning and although web GUIs are nice, i'm not at all adverse to getting into managing stuff via CLI. If your full time job is something to do with IT, I can see how you probably wouldn't want to do IT when you get home. My day job is probably as far away from IT as you can get (I'm a crane operator), so managing a couple of servers on my free time is a nice change of pace from the daily routine.

So I guess I've basically answered my own question! Looks like a seperate server it is.

Thanks again for the input!

 

[DrKK]

I had already read that article on RAID5 from ZDNET. I found it a little too "the sky is falling". The author makes some silly assumptions and does go out on a bit of a limb; but I do get the point of what he's saying. That said, I do agree that considering Z1 with a hot spare is pretty silly when I could just run Z2; not quite sure what I was thinking there.

I agree with you completely. That ZDNET article is exactly the kind of FUD that I hate seeing. The situation is nowhere near as dire as that article would suggest, and I would *HAPPILY* recommend RAID-Z to people running 3-drive vdevs, or even, in the case of non-huge-capacity drives, 4-drive vdevs.

The correct way to proceed is to take what some of the butt-clenching conservative RAID fascists on this forum suggest, make that an endpoint, and then to think about what less strict, but still knowledgable, people, like me, say. Then pick something on that continuum.

 

[BigDave]

The correct way to proceed is to take what some of the butt-clenching conservative RAID fascists on this forum

Spoken like a loose cheeked pacifist.
You... you promulgator of peace and love, you :p
AND just to let you know, those clenches are EXERCISE buddy!!!

 

[Tufkab]

I think I may have just found one of the aforementioned butt-clenchers!