Is this a reasonable setup?

[JakeHiltz]

Hey everyone,

I have been using FreeNas 9.1 AMD64 for my fathers business as a file server.

The company uses special software that employees can only use by using the computers within the office. These people are located in various parts of the world so VNC is used to login to 7 identical AMD machines ( home desktop grade) . The files were stored on WD My Book Live 2TB drives previously and mapped on each computer so users could access .

I have since setup a Proxmox VM server to get rid of all the desktops and am using FreeNas for the file server. The issue I am having now is that the disk size of the FreeNas box has grown significantly and I feel the hardware is now possibly going to become an issue.

I have viewed the CPU usage and it is quite low , but we plan on adding L2Tp/IPSEC connections from about 10 users who would like remote access to the server.

This is my hardware setup.

AMD sempron 130 (2.6Ghz Single Core)
8GB DDR3-1600
4x2TB WD Red Drives
4x2 WD Green Drives

I have access to an i7-3990 with 16GB DDR3-1600 for a couple hundred dollars . Would this be worth upgrading?

The disk are in a ZFS pool and I run periodic snap-shots once a day. It also is running transmission which uses the 2x2TB WD green drives. This is for home use. I know that ZFS pools are said to require 1GB per 1TB , but is this a hard requirement?

If there is anymore information I can provide please let me know.

Thanks

 

[JakeHiltz]

Also , there are often only small changes to Excel , Word and PDF docs. Large file transfers are very infrequent . At anytime there are ~5 users and at the peak there may be ~15 users .

 

[KMR]

I think you need to provide a little more detail. But first, a couple of questions / comments. Are you using a production file server for a business to host a torrent application, or is the file server hosting a torrent application on the same network? If so you are inviting trouble and should reconsider this configuration immediately. You have failed to mention ECC RAM. Does the current hardware or the proposed new hardware have ECC RAM? If not you need to do some reading; there are plenty of forum posts here about the need for ECC RAM with FreeNAS and ZFS. You also haven't mentioned a UPS. Are you using a UPS with a production file server? If not, get one. It is cheap insurance.
You mention the desire to add L2TP/IPSEC VPN capabilities to your network for users to access files remotely. How are you planning to achieving this? Are you proposing that you let the file server handle the authentication? If so, you should reconsider. Use one of those desktop grade AMD boxes that you shelved by bringing in Proxmox and toss pfSense on it. Better yet use two and run CARP for redundancy. pfSense will handle all of the routing/firewall/IDS/IPS/VPN/etc services you can throw at it provided you have even a couple hundred dollars worth of hardware.
Lastly, you haven't mentioned a backup strategy for this box. Someone please correct me if I am wrong here but I do not believe that snapshots are an effective backup strategy. If your pool is toasted in some fashion (from something like not having ECC RAM or a UPS) then you could find yourself up the creek in a real hurry.
Please provide more information about your configuration and don't be upset if some of the members here hassle you if you have things set up in a less than optimal way; they really are great resources and when dealing with a production box for business purposes the risk of losing data can be very costly indeed.

 

[JakeHiltz]

Thanks for the quick reply! I do not use ECC ram. The AMD boxes are still in use until the end of the month as there still used to some degree. I used Pfsense for a long time but have since switched to zeroshell for many reasons , one being pfSense does not allow windows clients to use L2TP/IPSEC. Zeroshell is handling all of the incoming VPN connections. It is already in use now but still testing because I do not want any issues once I setup several users. It runs on another machine similar to the AMD machines , zeroshell is really light-weight. Yes I am using a UPS . I do not use the snapshots for backup I use them to provide Windows shadow copies to users. The 4x2 WD Red drives are setup like this:

2x2 are mirrored remote users (2TB total storage)

2x2 are mirrored for local office users (2TB total storage)

The torrent jail is on the same network yes. The 2x2 WD green drives are also mirrored and are just used to download torrents. Should I remove this from the work sever? I was curious if this would be an issue.

 

[JakeHiltz]

I will completely remove the torrent jail right now and just use the WD My Book drives ( 2 ) and put transmission on them . I have done that before and it does have reasonable DL speeds.

 

[KMR]

Using a torrent application on the same network as a business is a security risk let alone on a business file server; use your business network for business functions. You need to invest in ECC RAM, like now. Check around the forum on how bad RAM can blow away an entire pool and your backups - in most business cases this would be bad news to say the least.
I'm not sure why you would set up separate mirrors for local and remote users but I'm sure there is a purpose, although I would think that this could easily be handled by permissions and quotas but it is up to you.
I'm not sure if your motherboard / CPU will support ECC RAM, but if they don't you should upgrade them as quickly as possible. That issue aside, if you have a device handling VPN connections and your server isn't taxed at current loads why do you think that adding another 15 users who access word documents will tax your current setup? The recommended amount of RAM is 6GB for the OS and 1GB per 1TB of usable storage. That suggests that 10GB would be recommended for your configuration (once you ditch the two drives used for torrents) but many have been able to get away with 8GB for light duty.
You could build a light duty business server with nice hardware for not a lot of money where you already have the drives; check around the forum for people using a G2020, SM motherboard, and ECC RAM. The first iteration of my file server used this configuration and worked very well for anything I could think to do - except of course dedup and encryption, but that doesn't seem to be what you are looking for anyway.

 

[KMR]

Another note: If you are thinking of spending a couple hundred dollars to upgrade the hardware I would say that you should be able to get components that suit your purposes much better than the ones you listed above (i7 + 16GB non-ecc RAM) for the same money. Check around the forum for different builds. I would recommend grabbing 16GB ECC RAM and a G2020 with a SuperMicro motherboard. It will leave you lots of room for more storage later and handle all of your needs.

 

[JakeHiltz]

Thanks for the replies KMR. I will grab myself some new server parts. I read a few "Why not to use non-ECC" posts and see that your point is very , very valid.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah. The build KMR recommended with ECC RAM, g2020 and supermicro (shoutout for x9scm-f) is an AMAZING choice. It would be the best cost to performance build you are going to get. I doubt you could beat it anywhere and lots of users use that exact setup.