So I'm mostly writing this to see if there is anything I should be doing before setting up FreeNAS... or if this setup is just not all that it's cracked up to be?
I plan to use it for:
Plex + media storage
NFS / CIFS shares
Target for guest VM's running on an ESXi box.
The hardware:
Dell R510 8bay
5 4TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration
Boot FreeNAS from USB stick
64GB of memory, but I could increase it to 128GB
Dual 2.26Ghz Xeon 4 core processors
10GB Mellanox NIC (for direct attach to my ESXi host)
1GB on-board for the rest of the network
Questions:
1. I've been told for iSCSI, the more memory the better, but is it still a good idea to give it some additional SSD space (PCIe card?) for caching?
2. Can I just 'hot-add' another 4TB disk and add it to the RAIDZ2 pool to extend my storage?
3. Is booting FreeNAS from USB a good way to go? Shuold I be using a PCIe NVME card? I'd like to leave the hot-swap bays in the front of the chassis for future expansion.
4. Backup. Are there backup add-ons or plugins for FreeNAS that allow you to dump volumes onto external, or network, storage?
I plan to use it for:
Plex + media storage
NFS / CIFS shares
Target for guest VM's running on an ESXi box.
The hardware:
Dell R510 8bay
5 4TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration
Boot FreeNAS from USB stick
64GB of memory, but I could increase it to 128GB
Dual 2.26Ghz Xeon 4 core processors
10GB Mellanox NIC (for direct attach to my ESXi host)
1GB on-board for the rest of the network
Questions:
1. I've been told for iSCSI, the more memory the better, but is it still a good idea to give it some additional SSD space (PCIe card?) for caching?
2. Can I just 'hot-add' another 4TB disk and add it to the RAIDZ2 pool to extend my storage?
3. Is booting FreeNAS from USB a good way to go? Shuold I be using a PCIe NVME card? I'd like to leave the hot-swap bays in the front of the chassis for future expansion.
4. Backup. Are there backup add-ons or plugins for FreeNAS that allow you to dump volumes onto external, or network, storage?