FreeNAS on a remote cloud system

[Phantom]

Hey guys, let me fill you in on what I'm needing and thinking here.

We have a lot of small remote offices all over the area that we need to have offsite backups done for. Most of these locations don't have a large amount of data, but as a whole there may be a few TB. Our central office doesn't have proper bandwidth to support doing the central server locally, at least not well. So the solution I have been working on is to rent a cloud server, install FreeNAS as a VM and have that be the backup target for all of the remote offices. The cloud server would be one that natively hosts ESXi and I would be given a direct interface for my resources. There would be nothing between the HV and the FreeNAS install (as far as I have been told)

I just got through reading
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/p...-production-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/page-3

and

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/a...-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/page-3

so as you can imagine, I'm second guessing this whole setup.

My first thought is that these topics are referencing doing virtualization locally, so I'm wondering if these concerns and problems would be the same on a hosted cloud server.

Here is my thoughts on how I would set this up:
Single 4core processor dedicated to this VM
8GB of dedicated RAM
2GB dedicated storage for the FreeNAS OS
From here, I would have a single virtual drive for each office set to its own dataset, mounted and controlled independently to help with permissions. I would not implement any of the RAID or drive level redundancy of FreeNAS and instead rely on the guarantee of the hosting service.

Has anyone tried anything like this or has any thoughts?

 

[pirateghost]

There is no difference between 'local' virtualization and 'cloud' virtualization. It's all the same virtualization.

What purpose do you have that necessitates a freenas box? Is there some aspect of freenas you want to utilize that a standard install of any bsd/Linux variant with appropriate software can't handle? Virtualizing freenas is a bad idea for rookies and especially when you can't even access the physical box.

Personally I would go the route of using a Linux box with adequate storage and configure backuppc with ssh keys to handle all my remote location backups. I would not add another layer of complexity like freenas to this environment.

 

[Phantom]

My initial thought was to reduce the amount of initial setup and configuration that comes with going with a standard linux distro, as well as the long term work of setting up the current offices and any potential future offices. I really liked the idea of having local FreeNas boxes at each location and simply using ZFS replication to push out the backups via SSH with very little busy work on my end. But of course now that I'm learning about all of the potential problems with virtualization, it seems this isn't going to save me any work at all.

Also, my bosses have a bit of an uninformed view of cloud servers. I actually did initially suggest we do whats necessary to host one locally in our office, but he didn't like the idea of having to be responsible for a local server. Let me also say that I am by no means an expert in FreeNAS or ESXi, but I do have considerable lab testing experience with both of them. I have yet to push anything out to production, hence why I'm trying to research all this before hand.

At this moment, I would still like more information on trying to do things this way, however I will also put out there that I will start developing a proposal to host this locally again. If there is a way I can do this in the cloud, I would at least like to know what it entails, otherwise I just want to be able to explain to him in detail why a local host would be better and not just have the explanation that "The forums said so".

 

[cyberjock]

Also, my bosses have a bit of an uninformed view of cloud servers. I actually did initially suggest we do whats necessary to host one locally in our office, but he didn't like the idea of having to be responsible for a local server. Let me also say that I am by no means an expert in FreeNAS or ESXi, but I do have considerable lab testing experience with both of them. I have yet to push anything out to production, hence why I'm trying to research all this before hand.

That's a problem you and him have to discuss. Depending on what you store on the server, it may be illegal to host or even do backups to a cloud. For example, if you store my health records in the cloud I can(and would if I knew you did that) sue you out of business for it. HEPA laws are very strict like that.

If there is a way I can do this in the cloud, I would at least like to know what it entails, otherwise I just want to be able to explain to him in detail why a local host would be better and not just have the explanation that "The forums said so".

I have no idea what you just said right there. "locally" means you control the server and all aspects of it. "remote" is when you let someone else handle that responsibility. You would be crazy to try to host a FreeNAS server in a cloud(if that is even somehow possible.. I hate clouds and I hate the phrase "cloud").

Many of us recognize the diffence, but most bosses will understand if you say: "If Amazon loses your data all you get is an apology. If we lose our data locally its our own fault for not doing proper administration and backups." It really is that simple. If he is scared that the data will be lost locally despite a proper backup routine(the cloud is NOT a means to justify skipping on backups) then he's either:

1. An idiot
2. He has no faith in his IT people(s) and should be hiring someone he CAN trust.

If he can't trust his IT guys with business information he's hired the wrong people.

I've known serveral people that have been forced to go to the cloud because they thought it would be cheaper/easier/both. They hate every minute of it. They're constantly waiting on the phone for their data provider, dealing with slow internet connections holding them back, and just about anything else you can think up as why cloud computing is bad.

 

[Phantom]

Ya, I think this is the brutal honesty I needed to hear to help kill this idea. I really wasn't to keen on doing things like this in the first place, but it was insisted on. While I don't believe any of the data we would be working with will fall under any legal requirements, I can't be sure at this time and didn't begin to think on that track yet. I wouldn't want to take that that risk either way, so I'm just gonna tell him exactly this. My biggest concern is that he may end up just going with some other paid outside service (which would be even stupider in my opinion) once he hears about this, or not do anything at all. Either way, this is looking to be a bigger problem to tackle then I had originally anticipated.

At this point I think I will just try to convince him that each office should have a local FreeNAS unit all backing up to a central storage server in our office will be really the only way to do this.

Thanks for the input.