Dell R740 xd and freenas

[tARDiDan]

Hello,

I'm looking for feedback running freenas on Dell R740 XD with a HBA330.
I think it "should" work, but....

Thank's a lot !

 

[Inxsible]

Hello,

I'm looking for feedback running freenas on Dell R740 XD with a HBA330.
I think it "should" work, but....

Thank's a lot !

I think it "depends", but....

 

[tARDiDan]

...I need first to buy it and test ?

 

[Inxsible]

...I need first to buy it and test ? :)

No, but you do need to describe what you intend to do with it so we can provide appropriate recommendations. Is this for a work environment or home use?

 

[tARDiDan]

Thanks.
It's for corporate use with low budget vs equalogic&co....

The main goal : have a working Nas under Zfs with 80-100 Tb.
After reading the full Internet :p, same configuration seems to work with older R730 and hba330, but not information on this "new" R740.
And we can't swap to another hardware brand like SuperMicro.
So, i'm looking for informations.

 

[Inxsible]

I found this spec sheet for R740XD, but you still need to tell us what configuration server you have or you are going to purchase

https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocument..._Documents/en/poweredge-r740xd-spec-sheet.pdf

From what I can see, if you choose the correct options, FreeNAS would work well with this server. Are you choosing the NVMe drives option or the HDDs? Are you planning on running a hypervisor on this server and install FreeNAS as a VM or are you going to install FreeNAS on bare metal?

You probably know this but

Accelerate workloads with up to 3 double-width 300W GPUs, up to 6 single-width 150W GPUs or up to 4 FPGAs.

Don't opt for the GPU option as that would not be used by FreeNAS at all.

 

[tARDiDan]

I'll start with 7200 Sas Disk (no SSD).
It'll be a bar metal install, so only one SSD (no NVME) for system partition, standard graphic card and Intel X710 10G.

 

[tARDiDan]

For information, server is in production state.
work very well ! (16 Disk 10To Raid Z2.... , HBA330 , 2 ssd for ZIL and ARC).

Very nice !

 

[Zword]

Hi @tARDiDan,

Can you provide more details about your configuration running hba 330 ? What kind of SSD are you using for ZIL and ARC ?
What is your ZFS pool design ?

Did you have any performance issue with the HBA330 ?

Thanks

 

[tARDiDan]

Hi,

Sorry, the server went away for production.
So far in memory , the config was the simpliest possible :

Data : Pool in raidZ2 : 16*10 To (10 To Nearline SAS 7200 3,5")
Sys : Raid 1 : 2 SSD (480 Go SSD SATA Read Intensive )
ZIL : 800 Go SSD SAS Mix Use
ARC : 800 Go SSD SAS Mix Use

The configuration for Data wasn't really best practice compliant (too many disk for that pool), but for us was working well.
This config was for a standard filer (office use) and backing up some data at night.

We were stunned about the speed on write acces with cifs on small files with this config.

Hope this help

 

[Zword]

Yes it’s helpful :)

I have 28 disks in an array, i might go for a ZFS Pool of two RAIDZ2 with 12 disks + 4 spare disk for 174TB of storage. :)