Is FreeNAS right for my needs (FreeNAS Newbie but otherwise experienced)

[TheWoodchuck]

I'm looking to go full-bore on a Simulated Enterprise VMLab/Plex host. I have a Xeon E5405 on a SuperMicro board with 16GB of ECC that I got for free-as-in-beer box after a customer upgrade. Currently it has 5 x 4TB SATAs in a spanned JBOD volume. I copied all the data off to 2 more 4TBs that I'd like to add into the server after I move the data back to the NAS. I'd really like to end up with a single volume when I'm done, for a total of 7x 4TB =28TB (minus overhead). I'm hoping to be able to afford that 8th 4TB sometime soon to fill out the hotswap bays.

My VM host is a Win2012 R2 Hyper-V box (Dual Xeon, and I'm hearing that I need to go iSCSI because Hyper-V doesn't support VHD images on a CIFS/NFS share, so that is also a concern. I guess I'll probably need to call iSCSI a requirement, because of this.

I have also lucked across a nice switch that should support LACP, so that would be nice to employ, as well.

So, Almighty FreeNAS Sages... Is FreeNAS going to be able to handle what I need? What sort of config should I be striving for?

If not, what might be a better option?

I'm sort of flexible here, but I don't have much of a budget. I've happened across a lot of really nice hardware for dirt cheap/free, and I'd love to build this out for a Enterprise-Sim home lab so I can really go to town building out VMs to learn on and host my PLEX library.

Let me know if I can answer any questions to fill in gaps.

Thanks Everybody!

Proof: My NAS (left) and my PowerEdge 2950 VM Host (right) http://i.imgur.com/vMUMCNS.jpg

 

[Darren Myers]

So.....since you brought up iSCSI, whatever vdev/pool you share out with iSCSI should not be filled beyond 50%, so if you create a vdev that is 8Tb in total size (after overhead) you should NOT use more then 4Tb of it, this is well documented around the forums and in the FreeNAS manual; it is due to fragmentation.

So you said you have a spanned JBOD volume, this does not sound like true JBOD, but rather something funny a HW RAID card is doing, what is the RAID card/HBA in the system you want to use for FreeNAS? The most popular cards used for FreeNAS are the LSI 9211-8i and the M1015 (crossflashed to 9211-8i firmware), these are all proven cards that simply work as intended.

LACP can be more trouble then its worth, check out the mega thread on it , most stay far away from it.

What RAIDz do you plan to use?

RAIDz1 would give you ~19Tb usable after overhead (+ the not filling beyond 80%), but this of course is not recommended at all due to the large disk sizes and the amount of complications you can suffer when having to resliver such a large drive/pool.

RAIDz2 Would give you ~15Tb usable after overhead (+ the not filling beyond 80%), this would be ideal as you can loose up to 2 drives, so in theory you could loose a drive during a resliver and still be ok, you may just need to change your underwear when it completes :P

RAIDz3 Would give you ~12Tb usable after overhead (+ the not filling beyond 80%),this would give you a 3 drive tolerance, but at a sacrifice of some speed, and free space.

Any of these options youre going to want more RAM, specially if you plan to use a plugin or 2.

Also note the 771 socket is older, and power hungry; even more so then my 1366 socket servers. So just keep that in mind

 

[TheWoodchuck]

Ouch. That's a LOT of caveats.

I've been kicking around a few different SAN OS options, but it looks like I may be going back with OpenFiler, mostly from an iSCSI performance aspect. FreeNAS access times are great for sequential reads, but for random, it goes to crap... I didn't even see the stuff about the 50% fragmentation issue.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[pirateghost]

Is openfiler even developed any more? Last time I used it it was stuck on 2.99. It seemed like all development had stopped on it. Personally I would go with open media vault or a custom CentOS install.

 

[Darren Myers]

Last I saw and used it was on 2.99, that was almost a year ago or so I used it; well tested it


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[pirateghost]

Yeah. Looks like they are still on 2.99. They were just releasing 2.99 when I stopped using it over 3 years ago.

I couldn't possibly trust my data to a dead project like that.

 

[ChriZ]

IMHO opinion the best non ZFS choice out there is OMV.