Any chance to RAID the freenas install itself?

[ciuly]

Hello,

first, I'm a first timer at freenas and alike (but I've done my share part of other under-the-hood things)
Second, I read the
http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...Virtual-Machine!&p=58364&viewfull=1#post58364
and
http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...ot-a-guide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data
and
a few others. And I'm still going forward, so let's not debate in that direction.

shortly: I am setting up a storage/fileserver for my existing home esxi. Easiest and cheapest solution is to go for something like freenas. My HW setup is all dual-hdd/dual-ssds in software raid1. As I'm on a consumer grade board, every VM is doing it's own sw-raid.
Target usage for freenas is 80-90% actual data storage (pictures, movies, music, documents and so on) and archiving (old VMs, backups) and the rest, various test VM's that I may need (things like winxp with 256mb ram, nothing fancy and not in requirement of performance).
The key aspect here is data-safety.

At current point, everything is raid-mirrored except for the new freenas VM for which I cannot find any tutorials on how-to-properly do it. I'm an old RH user, now centos based, and except pre-build stuff, I never had to mingle with freebsd and alikes or other linuxes.

So the question is: can I setup a software raid for the freenas OS itself?

If not, would a daily backup of the VM itself do the job in case there is a hdd failure of the SSD it will be installed on? That is, assuming the SSD crashes now and I have a 23 hour old copy of the VM, replace the SSD and copy over the backup and start it, will it function alright, picking up where the crashed one has left of with whatever data-recovery options there are for these kinds of situations? (data virtual disks will be on other drives so the chances for the OS drive and a data drive to crash a the same time should be pretty much 0)

To note that critical data will be automatically and periodically backed up by the current data backup solution running daily. The freenas solution here addresses 2 problems in my environment:
- have the data available easily to all members of the family in one place without moving the external drives all the time from computer to computer
- for me to be able to recover most if not all of my work since the last backup (this is where raid1 comes into play)

The only loose end in this configuration is the freenas itself not being mirrored.

Thank you.

 

[jgreco]

You don't need to care too much about FreeNAS itself. You need to worry about the configuration. If this is kept backed up on the pool, then reinstalling FreeNAS is a trivial thing. There are several scripts posted around here to automate backups of the config.

Why is your home ESXi all software RAID1? Get a nice ServeRAID M1015 (~$75 eBay), flash it to IR mode (or even just leave it with the IBM firmware), and have redundant storage for your ESXi host. Trying to make every VM do its own software RAID1 is like beating your head against a wall. If you need something faster, then M5015, with BBU if you want pretty zippy.

FreeNAS does not support software RAID1 for the boot. The designers assume USB is cheap and easy. Personally I've found it failure-prone and a little sucky. So you can get a cheap RAID controller and some cheap $40 SSD's and set up hardware RAID1 for a boot volume if you wish.

 

[cyberjock]

I've had the opposite of jgreco's experience with USB. I've had zero problems with it(aside from it having some slowness when doing configuration changes) but I generally don't have to mess with the configuration once FreeNAS is set up and running. I use name brand stuff(Kingston, Corsair, etc) and have had no problems at all. I was very skeptical at first and thought that using USB as a system drive was beyond crazy, but after about 10 computing years between all of the FreeNAS servers I've built I've had no failures at all.

Personally, if you want to be super-ultra-conservative about FreeNAS' system drive, buy the smallest Intel SSD you can get and install it on there. Intel SSDs seem to last forever, have a very low failure rate compared to other brands(especially OCZ) and have no chance of wearing out before you decide its too small to ever use for anything. Remember, it only uses 2GB(4GB for FreeNAS 9.x) and you can't use the unallocated space for anything else.

 

[ciuly]

@jgreco
thanks for the reply. I will look up those scripts and read the docs on the config stuff to get a hand on them.

Problem with extra hardware is space. All my pcie slots are filled and in use:| There is one I rarely use and could probably do without but that still leaves me with the logistics problem (I'm from Romania, and it doesn't make sense for me to buy stuff from the US anytime I want, so instead I concentrate on a one time per year purchase, around BF, then ship everything in one box along with other stuff my relatives send for Christmas; but that's my own problem to deal with;thing is new hardware is no game till early next year)

@cyberjock
all my USB is passed through to various VMs, and the one on a pcie card I bought recently is for the freenas to use with an external drive, so no available usb ports for that scenario :)
I still have my onboard usb3 connection free, but am still to get a bracket/internal hub for it (it's on the short list for BF) I may consider this approach if the current setup will not meet acceptable performance, but I think it will.

 

[ciuly]

thanks all, after much headache with a seagate 2TB disk with 1 ext3 partition which had 5 folders containing over 300GB worth of pre-existing data and freenas would just not show me the contents fo 2 of these folders containing the majority (over 200GB) of data, I am ditching the freenas approach and getting back to my original centos setup. More time to set things up but at least it's working meeting all my needs.

Thanks again.