Alternatives?

[Ryan Lovelett]

I am not necessarily throwing in the towel regarding my ESXi AIO machine. However, I would be silly to not heed the advice that it is an uphill struggle to performance tune and configure the system. Especially, if I am not going to be receiving any help from a community of experts (see: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/interpreting-and-understanding-iperf-results.16453).

I had been using an Ubuntu 12.04 based server with ZFS on Linux (http://zfsonlinux.org/) to provide all the services I required in the past. However, the ZFS disk I/O performance was abysmal. Now with my ESXi AIO machine my ZFS performance is closer to what I would have expected but my network performance is abysmal.

So it leads me to pose this question. I have more requirements than just having a ZFS storage pools for my data. Like hosting a few Ruby and PHP sites, hosting my Git repositories (using GitLab), acting as a Jenkins master node. Among other sundry tasks (local network DNS server, behind my firewall mail relay, VPN, etc...).

It would appear that FreeNAS is not the operating system that will allow me to do all of this. Am I right? If so what OS should I be using?

 

[cyberjock]

Assuming all of the programs you want to run are FreeBSD compatible you could run them in a jail. You'd have to look up what is/isn't compatible with FreeBSD though.

As for what OS to use, that's something you'd have to figure out for yourself based on your level of expertise with various OSes.

 

[Ryan Lovelett]

@cyberjock I have been looking into the jails and this does seem to fit my needs much nicer than the whole ESXi virtualization. ESXi was adding a lot of un-necessary complication to the configuration.

Though I have a new problem. My ZFS performance has degraded from my ESXi guest to "bare metal" FreeNAS installation. I was getting scrubs of around 300M/s when it was running as a guest and now it scrubbing at 90M/s. Same pools (I exported and imported them) same hardware (the LSI card was passed through in ESXi). Stranger still the FreeNAS machine has even more RAM than it did before (20G vs 12G) and CPUs (4 vs 2). I know "buy more RAM" seems to always be the solution when ZFS performance is bad but this seems counter intuitive.

I am going to keep tweaking things to see if I can get it back to where it was before. If not I will post a new thread in the performance forums.

 

[cyberjock]

Scrubbing will vary WIDELY in speed from file to file. I've had times where I get 1GB/sec and times when I get less than 150MB/sec. I don't consider scrubs to be a good indicator of pool performance for that reason. :P

The reality of it is you are probably running Gigabit(if you are like 90% of people here). As long as your pool performs fast enough to saturate Gigabit who cares if your pool is "even faster than that". You'll never realize that speed. ;)