After considering my current storage "solution", every day I realize more and more how useful a dedicated storage solution is.
My current setup:
I have 6x5TB external hard drives (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00J0O5R2I/?tag=ozlp-20) encrypted with LUKS and ext4 formatted. The drives are in two groups of 3, A and B. A1 is regular storage, some of it exported via NFS, some of it exported via SMB, and a 2T chunk partitioned off for one of my VMs. A2 contains rsnapshots of A1, and A3 is a copy of A2 (via rsync) updated every Monday morning. The B group follows this same pattern. This gives me 10T of usable space with two drives for redundancy in each group. How can I replicate or closely approximate this with FreeNAS, and what's the best way to migrate the data over?
I apologize if some of these questions are answered in the 280 page guide, I just haven't had a chance to read through the whole thing yet, and I figured I'd try to get a feel for what FreeNAS is capable of from the community. Feel free to point me to the section in the guide if you'd rather do that than answer the question here.
In summary, my goal is to have a single centralized storage server that possibly doubles as a media server (Plex?) (I've just been using NFS/CIFS and it works fine), with an up-to-date backup on one (or more) USB HDDs, preferably with a different filesystem, and as a nice bonus, an encrypted backup on crashplan or backblaze or some other online backup service. I really don't want to give up my rsnapshot solution, but if ZFS snapshots can replace it, I would love to hear more about that. Right now, my rsnapshot snapshots aren't true snapshots, in that they're not read only, and I have a daily cron that goes in and cleans up old files that I don't care about (mostly temp files, or things I don't really want to store long term).
My current setup:
I have 6x5TB external hard drives (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00J0O5R2I/?tag=ozlp-20) encrypted with LUKS and ext4 formatted. The drives are in two groups of 3, A and B. A1 is regular storage, some of it exported via NFS, some of it exported via SMB, and a 2T chunk partitioned off for one of my VMs. A2 contains rsnapshots of A1, and A3 is a copy of A2 (via rsync) updated every Monday morning. The B group follows this same pattern. This gives me 10T of usable space with two drives for redundancy in each group. How can I replicate or closely approximate this with FreeNAS, and what's the best way to migrate the data over?
- Will ZFS snapshots effectively replace my rsnapshot setup? I really like having the ability to easily look at the files on A2/B2. I've also got some scripts that go through and delete junk (duplicate files, temp folders, etc) on A2/B2 because of how long the sync from A2 to A3 takes. It used to take an hour or two, but since I started backing up my windows drive to it, it now takes 20+ hours.
- If I want to rotate out external drives for offsite backup, what would be the best way to do this?
- Can/should I run VMs on the freenas server?
- I currently have an 8gb centos 7 box that runs my VMs. Can/should I move the VM storage (boot disk or otherwise) to an iSCSI/NFS mount on FreeNAS? I was thinking of maybe getting 2 SSDs for this, but it sounds like the bottleneck will be my 1 gig NIC, so faster drives won't have much benefit. One of my VMs (MythTV) is very latency/bandwidth sensitive. I tried giving it an NFS share off of its hypervisor, and it was too slow to keep up, and it would stop recording the show halfway through.
- I see a lot of talk about using USB devices as boot devices. This seems really unusual to me. How much data is stored on the boot device? What happens if my boot device fails? Do I need to reinstall and reconfigure FreeNAS? How important is it to back up the boot device? Can/should I store the boot information in my pool?
- Can I share a dataset with both Windows and Linux guests? I see that you have to pick Unix or Windows as the type of ACL on the dataset creation wizard. Should I just pick Windows? If I want it read only on Windows and read write in Linux, does that make a difference? Can I even do that?
- How mutable are pools/datasets/vdevs? If I decide later I want to add more storage but I don't want to sacrifice redundancy, what are my options?
- Is there a rule of thumb between the number of datasets per pool, or the number of disks per vdev?
- If I wanted to set up offsite online backups with backblaze or crashplan, could I encrypt the files before sending them to the backup service? What would be the best way to handle this, without encrypting the whole pool?
- Is it possible to encrypt a single dataset?
- If I take a single drive from a mirror, can I plug it in to another computer and read data off of it? It's just a zfs filesystem, right?
- Can I automatically delete old snapshots if I'm running out of space?
I apologize if some of these questions are answered in the 280 page guide, I just haven't had a chance to read through the whole thing yet, and I figured I'd try to get a feel for what FreeNAS is capable of from the community. Feel free to point me to the section in the guide if you'd rather do that than answer the question here.
In summary, my goal is to have a single centralized storage server that possibly doubles as a media server (Plex?) (I've just been using NFS/CIFS and it works fine), with an up-to-date backup on one (or more) USB HDDs, preferably with a different filesystem, and as a nice bonus, an encrypted backup on crashplan or backblaze or some other online backup service. I really don't want to give up my rsnapshot solution, but if ZFS snapshots can replace it, I would love to hear more about that. Right now, my rsnapshot snapshots aren't true snapshots, in that they're not read only, and I have a daily cron that goes in and cleans up old files that I don't care about (mostly temp files, or things I don't really want to store long term).
