Grooming with first NAS build.

[wielkaberta]

Hello,
I've started second week of grooming and here are my results so far.
Apologies for long post.

Background:
- Long time ago, I made naive implementation of RAID on my "multimedia" workstation, which is HW RAID-5 with 8 TB working space (AsRock Z97, Hitachi disks).
-- I'd still keep it as offline backup later on.
- Got couple of workstations in my house.
- I'm from Poland, the hardware availability and prices might vary from newegg / amazon.
- I've got some admin experiences as former Wintel (moderate) and Linux (less), so I'd like to make some jails.
- Already had a lecture with wonderful FreeNAS Community Hardware Guide 2016-10 Rev 1e)

NAS purpose:

• Storage w/ SMB, NFS functionalities entirely. I would like to have two "pools", where one is for "archive" purpose and second would serve as working directory between workstations.
  
• To develop some extra jails serving as DNS and DHCP server (to substitute them instead of home router)
• To place PBX (Asterisk/FreePBX(edit/correction)) server (but for extremely low usage - max 2 concurrent calls) for development/testing purposes.

Build (I also provide prices converted from PLN to USD):

Case - NZXT H440 - 122$ - https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811146217 (bought it)
Reason: A very cheap case, which has pretty good fan setup (already 3x front included). Two slots for SSD just on top of PSU and 10 HDD slots.

CPU: G4600 - 73$ (eventually i3-6300)
Question for G4600. Is it enough to handle things mentioned above? Or should jump to i3? G4600 is ~$73, while i3-6300 is twice as much.

Mobo: SuperMicro X11SSM-F (MBD-X11SSM-F-O) - 242$
Nuff said, is just everywhere on this forum and is pretty cheap.

RAM: Crucial UDIMM DDR4, 16GB 2400MHz, CL17 ECC (CT16G4WFD824A) - $224
- I don't like it costs as much as motherboard, but I don't think I can go cheaper.

HDD "archive": 5 x 6TB WD Red / HGST (depends which are cheaper) in RAIDZ-2 mode. - each one oscillate around 220$
- AFAIK, the RAIDZ-1/RAID5, so better to buy extra than be sorry.

HDD "working directory": I just take any Seagate(s) for that role, which I have in spare.

SSD: Any Intel5xx should do - each around for 110$ for 120GB.
Either one or two, as I see here that some users' configurations use second one for jail instances.

PSU: Thermaltake Paris 650W (W0493RE) - for 125$
- It has 12 SATA connectors, so whenever I fill like to expand to maximum (w/ adapter card), I don't have to replace it.
-- Therefore I don't have to meddle with molex to sata.
- https://www.amazon.de/Thermaltake-Paris-Plus-PC-Netzteil-ATX23/dp/B00IJERM8M

 

[kdragon75]

Just a word of warning, if you need any kind of write performance from NFS you will NEED an SSD for a SLOG. Otherwise you look good but I'm not the best with hardware quirks.

 

[BigDave]

PBX (Asterisk/Freenas) server

Your overall hardware looks like it will do the job for your storage needs, however the addition of
Asterisk/PBX may require you to upgrade that CPU and the amount of RAM that is proposed. This
of course would depend on how resource hungry that software would be to run in FreeNAS, I would
confirm this information before making any purchases.

 

[BigDave]

Just a word of warning, if you need any kind of write performance from NFS you will NEED an SSD for a SLOG. Otherwise you look good but I'm not the best with hardware quirks.

IMHO a SLOG could be added later, of the performance is found to be lacking AFTER it's up and running.

 

[kdragon75]

IMHO a SLOG could be added later, of the performance is found to be lacking AFTER it's up and running.

It all depends on your workload.That's why these BUILD threads are a bit tricky. We can till you that everything is supported and compatible but without knowing you workload IO profiles it hard to make solid recommendations. In this case I will point out you have allocated 6 sata ports already any your board does not support M.2 SSDs. If you do need a SLOG you may need an HBA to expand further.

It can all be added later, just plan ahead.

 

[wielkaberta]

Many thanks for the words of advice.

@BigDave
I actually meant FreePBX, my mistake :). Anyway, I will investigate if pbx actually "tops" when calls are made.

@kdragon75 @BigDave
>io profile
Well, it is really hard to actually guess at this point. Since my storage is for "archive" I don't expect to make R/W actions all the time.
>add SSD for SLOG later
Since, this is the first time I hear it, I got one question.
There is no problem with "including" SLOG to already working pool? If so, then I am satisfied.

 

[kdragon75]

Many thanks for the words of advice.

@BigDave
I actually meant FreePBX, my mistake :). Anyway, I will investigate if pbx actually "tops" when calls are made.

@kdragon75 @BigDave
>io profile
Well, it is really hard to actually guess at this point. Since my storage is for "archive" I don't expect to make R/W actions all the time.
>add SSD for SLOG later
Since, this is the first time I hear it, I got one question.
There is no problem with "including" SLOG to already working pool? If so, then I am satisfied.

You can add and remove a SLOG at will from the command line. For archiving, a SLOG is less important as you will typically be working with large quasi sequential IO.

 

[wielkaberta]

Anyway, I've finished build. Thanks for the help. In return, I reckon, I would share with effort:

• Assembly: https://imgur.com/a/TOUFTGm
• Example of running IPMI client in Windows: https://imgur.com/a/K4OLi5d

I already got running FreeNAS instance and devices are visible, but I got one question though. Is it possible to utilize the first SSD even more?
While I've got running instance of operating systems on it, could I also run SLOG on it? I already got the second SSD for that, but just wondering.

 

[kdragon75]

Anyway, I've finished build. Thanks for the help. In return, I reckon, I would share with effort:

• Assembly: https://imgur.com/a/TOUFTGm
• Example of running IPMI client in Windows: https://imgur.com/a/K4OLi5d

I already got running FreeNAS instance and devices are visible, but I got one question though. Is it possible to utilize the first SSD even more?
While I've got running instance of operating systems on it, could I also run SLOG on it? I already got the second SSD for that, but just wondering.

No it is not possible to share the boot drive.

 

[wielkaberta]

Alright, I've been toying with datasets and CIFS / NFS shares and so far I am learning a lot.
Now I got a little "challenging" question though about jails.

So my hierarchy initally looks something like this.

Code:

storage
-storage
--jails //custom created by plugin wizard
--media
--cppDevelopment
--cloud

Each of listing is a dataset.
A transmission (torrent client) was made and I've directed jail's path (/media) to /mnt/storage/media and it's working fine. All R/W is doing great.

Now what I want to ask is. I had expanded media dataset with more datasets to look like this.

Code:

storage
-storage
--jails //custom created by plugin wizard
--media
---hugeComicBookCollection
---steamBackups
---isoFiles
--cppDevelopment
--cloud

The problem is. I put some content to hugeComicBookCollection and I can see it from root shell after listing.
When I run jail shell I see "native" (non-dataset) dirs and files. I also see hugeComicBookCollection dir, but no content, which is visible from native OS.
I am sure this is intentional, therefore I have two questions:

• is there a way to access sub-dataset from that jail, which doesn't break jailing rules?
• (optionally) ultimately I can create sub-dataset called torrentManagedMedia and call it quits. After all, this will be not visible from sharing perspective
  
• is it a good idea to granulate datasets that much?

 

[onceler]

Sharing a dataset with a jail is not recursive - when you share the media dataset with your jail, that does not share the datasets contained within it.

You will need to also share /media/hugeComicBookCollection to /mnt/storage/media/hugeComicBookCollection for your jail to be able to see the contents.