Greetings all,
A friend and I are looking to start a B2B cloud business which would include in converting physical servers at business offices into virtual machines and centralize them to our vSphere infrastructure at a datacenter. For this I would want a solid storage solution and I've been using freenas at home for months now (with a VM + SATA controller passthrough). However I am not sure if I would want to create this one as a VM or as a physical host, which is where I hope you guys can give some advice. The NAS/storage will ONLY be running VMware-based virtual machines, nothing else. I also plan to zfs send this entire dataset to my home (got 200mb/s down so should be sufficient)
Here's the box I got:
Chassis: Lenovo/IBM x3550 M4 with 8 drive bays (2.5")
Processors: 2x E5-2640 cpu's (24 threads)
Memory: Up to 384GB DDR3 ECC RDIMM's. I have all sticks but would 192GB be OK as well?
Drives: 8x 1TB 7.2K NL-SAS drives (IBM brand) + 2x 100GB DC S3700 Intel SSD's
PCI: M5110e controller or M1015 flashed to LSI IT mode as well as 2x intel 750 800gb ssd's
Network: 2x10gb sfp+ mezzanine card
Now I have a few questions about this one... Here we go:
- To VM or not to VM? What would be the best? I do have 2 other e5-based systems with 256g of ram which could take care of the virtual hosting
- Is 384GB of memory overkill for arc? I want as big of a cache as possible but also not overdo it
- Does memory speed matter? Most of the sticks I got are 1066mhz but i also have some 1333mhz and 1600nhz. I would want all sticks to be same speed in the box.
- Does it make sense to use 2 of the S3700 SSD's as boot volume for freenas? This would mean I could only use 6 HDD's for the storage. Is USB a sensible way to go for boot volume?
- Should I enable swap on the various disks? I have had issues with my home freenas, crashing because one drive died and had some swap data on it (even with 128gb of memory)
- Is it sensible to use one or both intel 750 ssd's as SLOG? The second one could be used for a second lenovo box
- iSCSI or NFS? I have used NFS for the most as I find it simple but does iSCSI have some advantages? (I guess VMFS6 as we will be running vSphere 6.5)
- To dedupe or not to dedupe?
- One dataset or several datasets?
- Any other tips/ideas?
Thanks in advance to all who can help me clarify these things. :) I'm interested in building the fastest storage but of course also keep the data safe.
Thanks,
Chris
A friend and I are looking to start a B2B cloud business which would include in converting physical servers at business offices into virtual machines and centralize them to our vSphere infrastructure at a datacenter. For this I would want a solid storage solution and I've been using freenas at home for months now (with a VM + SATA controller passthrough). However I am not sure if I would want to create this one as a VM or as a physical host, which is where I hope you guys can give some advice. The NAS/storage will ONLY be running VMware-based virtual machines, nothing else. I also plan to zfs send this entire dataset to my home (got 200mb/s down so should be sufficient)
Here's the box I got:
Chassis: Lenovo/IBM x3550 M4 with 8 drive bays (2.5")
Processors: 2x E5-2640 cpu's (24 threads)
Memory: Up to 384GB DDR3 ECC RDIMM's. I have all sticks but would 192GB be OK as well?
Drives: 8x 1TB 7.2K NL-SAS drives (IBM brand) + 2x 100GB DC S3700 Intel SSD's
PCI: M5110e controller or M1015 flashed to LSI IT mode as well as 2x intel 750 800gb ssd's
Network: 2x10gb sfp+ mezzanine card
Now I have a few questions about this one... Here we go:
- To VM or not to VM? What would be the best? I do have 2 other e5-based systems with 256g of ram which could take care of the virtual hosting
- Is 384GB of memory overkill for arc? I want as big of a cache as possible but also not overdo it
- Does memory speed matter? Most of the sticks I got are 1066mhz but i also have some 1333mhz and 1600nhz. I would want all sticks to be same speed in the box.
- Does it make sense to use 2 of the S3700 SSD's as boot volume for freenas? This would mean I could only use 6 HDD's for the storage. Is USB a sensible way to go for boot volume?
- Should I enable swap on the various disks? I have had issues with my home freenas, crashing because one drive died and had some swap data on it (even with 128gb of memory)
- Is it sensible to use one or both intel 750 ssd's as SLOG? The second one could be used for a second lenovo box
- iSCSI or NFS? I have used NFS for the most as I find it simple but does iSCSI have some advantages? (I guess VMFS6 as we will be running vSphere 6.5)
- To dedupe or not to dedupe?
- One dataset or several datasets?
- Any other tips/ideas?
Thanks in advance to all who can help me clarify these things. :) I'm interested in building the fastest storage but of course also keep the data safe.
Thanks,
Chris
