FreeNAS adopter leaving NexentaStor

[Jurriaan Saathof]

Hi,

My name is Jurriaan and I am from the Netherlands. I am not new to ZFS but I am (sort of) to FreeNAS. I work as a storage expert in Amsterdam storing a lot of petabytes on tape (Tape is very much alive!). So I have some storage expertise and affinity and like to think that I know what I'm doing.

I have two NASes, one of which already running ZFS. The ZFS NAS is based on NexentaStor CE. I did some tests a couple of years ago with several ZFS operating systems (one of which being FreeNAS, don't remember the version) and found NexentaStor the fastest. My other NAS is a QNAP which is now 7 years old and is in need of replacement.

Now that Nexenta has released it's new and improved version 5 of NexentaStor the Community Edition restrictions are changed. The allowed capacity has gone down and I read somewhere that the new NexentaFusion GUI is only allowed to manage one NAS for the Community Edition. Since I wanted to replace my old QNAP I am turning away from Nexenta at the moment. Ans not only for my new NAS. I want to convert my existing NexentaStor NAS to FreeNAS as well. I have read the the performance of FreeNAS has improved. Besides that I get the impression that the community is more active than the Nexenta one.

But that is enough bashing. My existing ZFS NAS is based on a Xeon E3-1265L V2 (Low power, ECC support) on a mini-ITX board. It has 16GB of ECC memory (max :-( ) and 2 GE interfaces. I have 6x 3TB WD red disks (RAIDZ2) for data and 2x 32GB SSD (mirrored) for the OS. The case is a 8 disk hot-swappable one so I can also swap my OS disks while running. The disks are connected to an IBM M1015 (IT flashed) and evenly distributed over the interfaces (1 OS, 3 data over two SFF 8087 intefaces). Just to make sure the load is distributed.

I have planned my new NAS to be somewhat the same capacity. So for my new NAS already have some parts. Still missing the disks for data and a case. Again a mini-ITX board but this time with a C2550 Atom processor (also with ECC support but cheaper than the Xeon). This time I couldn't find a cheap M1015 so I flashed a Dell PERC 310, which is the same card.

I have installed FreeNAS 10 and I am really looking forward to run that in production. For the moment I will stay at FreeNAs 9.10. I have been playing around with FreeNAS and I think I will be happy with it. I am looking forward interacting with the community (if I have the time).

Cheers,

Jurriaan

 

[Mirfster]

Welcome. Sounds like you are doing things correctly. Just watch-out for the "Hardware Addiction Bug"... It eventually gets all of us and you'll find yourself perusing eBay, Amazon, NewEgg, etc... a lot more than normal. ;)

 

[Jurriaan Saathof]

As I already posted in another thread I'm connecting my FreeNAS test setup to an InfluxDB/Grafana server. InfluxDB is a time-series database, Grafana is a tool for creating monitoring dashboards. Grafana can be configured to read data from InfluxDB. This server is already monitors other machines so I wanted to add my FreeNAS server. Something I wasn't able to do with NexentaStor.

I changed the config for collectd on my FreeNAS machine in /conf/base/etc/local/collectd.conf. I added loading the network plugin to be able to send the data to my InfluxDB.

Code:

LoadPlugin network

And the configuration of the server plugin:

Code:

<Plugin network>
        Server "<YOUR_INFLUXDB_IP" "25826"
</Plugin>

I restarted collectd to get it to send data to my server.

The InfluxDB config must be configured for accepting collectd data. I have this configuration. This is configured in /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

Code:

[[collectd]]
  enabled = true
  bind-address = ":25826"
  database = "collectd_db"
  retention-policy = ""
  batch-size = 10000
  batch-pending = 5
  batch-timeout = "1s"
  read-buffer = 0
  typesdb = "/usr/share/collectd/types.db"

Be sure to restart influxdb when the config is changed. Now that all data is collected in InfluxDB you can create graphs in Grafana.

I also created a script to gather the CPU temperature in FreeNAS send it via UDP to my InfluxDB server. I am also working on a script for gathering HDD temperatures with amsrtctl which is also sent to my InfluxDB via UDP. This way, I have all information on one place and I can create nice graphs.

My monitoring script can be found here:

https://github.com/jsaathof/monitor_bsd_cputemp