PrivateSnuffy
Dabbler
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2012
- Messages
- 12
Hi all. New to the FreeNAS community, haven't used it before on smaller units for folks for simple sharing, but something about it recently intrigued me. I'm a net admin at my job, and our aging Equallogic 4000E is soon to be out of warranty, and we are moving most of our production to a datacenter, but we will have Dev/DR at our location to run certain legacy systems. The cost to keep the SAN in warranty for another two years is close to $4500, and I'd really hate to through $4500 down a toilet, as I think once its over, it will be unsupported and we will need a new unit anyway. Our IOPS is very low according to our DPAK tool (~300 IOPS for all our VMs, which is like 25).
I'm scoping out some cheaper units, because after our production is going to be moved out, further limiting the iops/space needed to get things going. I've pretty much done VMware with Equallogic exclusively, so its a bit out of my comfort zone, especially since the whole ZFS, RaidZ is a new way of thinking. I have a good bit of Linux knowledge from the years of setting up LAMP, admin of our ERP system (xtuple) that was all linux based at my old job. Currently i'm looking at some of the units from EMC, Netapp, and HP but they all seem a bit too much for what i really need to accomplish.
I know if done properly, FreeNAS functions very well with VMware and ESXi, due to supporting iSCSI and NFS. I think the biggest challenge is picking out the best equipment and getting the best performance out of the device. Again, I'm not trying to run highly critical stuff, but kinda trying to match or beat the equallogic currently (an 8TB model 4000E with 7.2k drives). I've put together some lists from newegg to build one, or to just buy an off the shelf dell 720 and shove drives in it (after market of course, $400 more for a 1TB drive on newegg is highway robbery!).
Some questions I have are:
1. Will I have to have SSD's in Raid 1 for ZIL?
2. Whats the best configuration of storage for a 12 x 1 TB SAS 6.0 array?
3. Should I load more than 16GB of memory in
4. Dell forces me to get a H310, can that work with ZFS if i keep them out of a hardware raid config?
5. Are the supermicro barebones a good alternative?
6. Any of you guys have some tips when working with VMware?
I don't wanna be that guy, I've search a bit already on the forums thus far, and definitely got caught up to speed. Just looking for some opinions from fellow net admins.
I'm scoping out some cheaper units, because after our production is going to be moved out, further limiting the iops/space needed to get things going. I've pretty much done VMware with Equallogic exclusively, so its a bit out of my comfort zone, especially since the whole ZFS, RaidZ is a new way of thinking. I have a good bit of Linux knowledge from the years of setting up LAMP, admin of our ERP system (xtuple) that was all linux based at my old job. Currently i'm looking at some of the units from EMC, Netapp, and HP but they all seem a bit too much for what i really need to accomplish.
I know if done properly, FreeNAS functions very well with VMware and ESXi, due to supporting iSCSI and NFS. I think the biggest challenge is picking out the best equipment and getting the best performance out of the device. Again, I'm not trying to run highly critical stuff, but kinda trying to match or beat the equallogic currently (an 8TB model 4000E with 7.2k drives). I've put together some lists from newegg to build one, or to just buy an off the shelf dell 720 and shove drives in it (after market of course, $400 more for a 1TB drive on newegg is highway robbery!).
Some questions I have are:
1. Will I have to have SSD's in Raid 1 for ZIL?
2. Whats the best configuration of storage for a 12 x 1 TB SAS 6.0 array?
3. Should I load more than 16GB of memory in
4. Dell forces me to get a H310, can that work with ZFS if i keep them out of a hardware raid config?
5. Are the supermicro barebones a good alternative?
6. Any of you guys have some tips when working with VMware?
I don't wanna be that guy, I've search a bit already on the forums thus far, and definitely got caught up to speed. Just looking for some opinions from fellow net admins.