Howdy

[Marian]

I am trying to build a company nas. One solution I am in favour of is FreeNAS. Hope to get some advices. Thanks so far, Have a good day !
Marian

 

[anodos]

I am trying to build a company nas. One solution I am in favour of is FreeNAS. Hope to get some advices. Thanks so far, Have a good day !
Marian

Determine what your needs are, then get good hardware. Look at hardware recommendation stickies.

 

[Marian]

Determine what your needs are, then get good hardware. Look at hardware recommendation stickies.

Our need is a central storage for VMs. I.e. 3 Hypervisors (ESXi) accessing the shared storage via nfs and are running VMs from there. We bought HP D2220sb (as part of a Bladesystem) with 1.2 TB hard disks. Storage is connected via 10GBit/s ethernet. We are starting with 4 hard disks. In the end there are probably 10 storage disks and 2 flushdisks to provide read/write cache. I am currently thinking to use 2 RaidZ2 volumes with 5 disks each, which gives quite good read/write performance and good availabilty as well. (tolerates 2 failing disks)
Initally I was thinking to use HPE StoreVirtual, but there are license issues. Now I start to investigate FreeNAS.

 

[anodos]

Our need is a central storage for VMs. I.e. 3 Hypervisors (ESXi) accessing the shared storage via nfs and are running VMs from there. We bought HP D2220sb (as part of a Bladesystem) with 1.2 TB hard disks. Storage is connected via 10GBit/s ethernet. We are starting with 4 hard disks. In the end there are probably 10 storage disks and 2 flushdisks to provide read/write cache. I am currently thinking to use 2 RaidZ2 volumes with 5 disks each, which gives quite good read/write performance and good availabilty as well. (tolerates 2 failing disks)
Initally I was thinking to use HPE StoreVirtual, but there are license issues. Now I start to investigate FreeNAS.

Probably the No. 1 rule of ZFS is that you don't put it on top of hardware RAID solutions. RAIDZ also isn't going to provide the performance characteristics you need for VM storage.

 

[Marian]

Probably the No. 1 rule of ZFS is that you don't put it on top of hardware RAID solutions. RAIDZ also isn't going to provide the performance characteristics you need for VM storage.

Yes very good point, and I already understood that this is crucial when using zfs. According to hardware/firmware doc it is possible to use the system in hba mode.

 

[anodos]

I haven't used HP's blade servers. I assume the storage blade is backed by an HP P420i RAID controller. If so, it doesn't appear to have a true HBA mode. Since this is a storage blade, it'd probably be a better idea to use it as direct attached storage for an ESXI instance installed on the primary blade server. It might also be possible to pass the entire device through to a specific VM, but if you do this you still should probably avoid ZFS.