Can/Should I run FreeNAS if I already have a hardware RAID solution?

[benze]

I have recently recycled an older HP server (dual Xeon, w/ 72G ram) and an HP P410 Hardware RAID card. I have the RAID configured as a RAID 5 and have Citrix XenServer 6.x installed on it.

I am considering running FreeNAS as a VM on it to create a NAS for the house as well as easy Plex server, etc.

Is it worth running FreeNAS if I already have a hardware raid solution? Will I be limiting myself since I only have a single Virtual drive to present to FreeNAS when creating my disks?

Thanks,

Eric

 

[tvsjr]

There's not much point in running FreeNAS in this environment. The wonderful thing about FreeNAS and ZFS in general is how paranoid it is about your data. By putting an abstraction layer underneath, it's not able to protect your data quite the same way anymore.

What you can do is (assuming the hardware supports it) pass an HBA through to the VM, where it can access the drives directly.

 

[benze]

Is ZFS over multiple drives going to be more likely to keep my data safe than a hardware RAID-5 solution? Why not just use ZFS on a virtual drive instead? Won't some of the benefits of ZFS still apply?

By passing an HBA through to the VM for the VM to access the drives, I would essentially be bypassing the RAID card altogether. However, I already have all drives mapped by the RAID and presented as a single storage volume to XenServer to present individual VHDs to the VM.

Are there other NAS solutions that I could use in this context? I guess I could just run Ubuntu and provide NFS shares and the like; I don't know if that is easier to do.

Thanks,

Eric

 

[Arwen]

Is ZFS over multiple drives going to be more likely to keep my data safe than a hardware RAID-5 solution?

Short answer - Yes, period.

Long answer - I personally have had multiple times where hardware RAID failed to protect my data but
ZFS would have worked perfectly.

Why not just use ZFS on a virtual drive instead?

ZFS can't perform some of the automatic error detection and correction that it's capable of performing.

Won't some of the benefits of ZFS still apply?

ZFS can detect, but can't correct errors all errors. In theory your hardware RAID-5 will perform some of
the error detection and correction. But not as complete as ZFS.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Read some of the threads in my suggested threads section of my signature. All your questions will be answered and your have lots to learn.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Donny Davis]

Do you have a gen6 dl380?

I have two I yanked the not so hot p410 out of and put in some HBA'S for a storage server. Are you trying to get multifunction from a single server?

 

[Holt Andrei Tiberiu]

Do you have a gen6 dl380?

I have two I yanked the not so hot p410 out of and put in some HBA'S for a storage server. Are you trying to get multifunction from a single server?

If you want to change the controller, you can with LSI 9211-8i, it will be compatible with your HP backplane, for me it was.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hp-proliant-se326m1-storage-server.47480/