RedBear
Explorer
- Joined
- May 16, 2015
- Messages
- 53
I need some feedback from anyone who has been using FreeNAS/FreeBSD and specifically jails for a long time.
As some might recall I'm using FreeNAS (current) on a ThinkServer TS440 Xeon with 32GB RAM and 8 small 120GB SATA drives as a test bed to learn on. Every time I destroy and redo the main ZFS pool inhabiting the 8-drive array, I of course have to reinstall whatever plugins I already installed since the jails directory (dataset?) is automatically created on the only available ZFS pool.
I hit upon the idea of getting the jails/plugins to install onto a pair of smaller mirrored disks, perhaps some small SSDs, so that the jails don't get destroyed along with the larger ZFS pool. My question is how big will jails eventually get, if the main storage each jail is using is in a separate larger ZFS pool? Initially they mostly seem pretty small, around 50MB each with one being about 650MB. Do they have a tendency to get larger over time for any reason that I might not understand?
I understand completely that if I do this I'll still have to shut down the jails and reattach the relevant storage to each jail every time I destroy the larger ZFS pool, and whatever Plex did to index the test data will have to be redone on the new test data, for instance. I'm just trying to avoid the somewhat lengthy and very hands-on process of redownloading and reinstalling the plugins each time I experiment with a new pool setup on the main array. That part takes a surprisingly long time with some plugins.
Would a pair of 60GB SSDs handle a few jails/plugins long-term? Or is even that much space and SSDs overkill? What about a pair of 32GB USB drives? Would there be any noticeable loss of plugin performance with USB thumb drives vs SSDs, or is plugin performance much more a function of CPU, available RAM and the speed of the main storage pool?
And, as a complementary question, would it be easy to move the whole jails dataset to a different pool if necessary? I'm not sure I know exactly how I would go about doing that in a correct way that wouldn't cause the FreeNAS UI to freak out.
As some might recall I'm using FreeNAS (current) on a ThinkServer TS440 Xeon with 32GB RAM and 8 small 120GB SATA drives as a test bed to learn on. Every time I destroy and redo the main ZFS pool inhabiting the 8-drive array, I of course have to reinstall whatever plugins I already installed since the jails directory (dataset?) is automatically created on the only available ZFS pool.
I hit upon the idea of getting the jails/plugins to install onto a pair of smaller mirrored disks, perhaps some small SSDs, so that the jails don't get destroyed along with the larger ZFS pool. My question is how big will jails eventually get, if the main storage each jail is using is in a separate larger ZFS pool? Initially they mostly seem pretty small, around 50MB each with one being about 650MB. Do they have a tendency to get larger over time for any reason that I might not understand?
I understand completely that if I do this I'll still have to shut down the jails and reattach the relevant storage to each jail every time I destroy the larger ZFS pool, and whatever Plex did to index the test data will have to be redone on the new test data, for instance. I'm just trying to avoid the somewhat lengthy and very hands-on process of redownloading and reinstalling the plugins each time I experiment with a new pool setup on the main array. That part takes a surprisingly long time with some plugins.
Would a pair of 60GB SSDs handle a few jails/plugins long-term? Or is even that much space and SSDs overkill? What about a pair of 32GB USB drives? Would there be any noticeable loss of plugin performance with USB thumb drives vs SSDs, or is plugin performance much more a function of CPU, available RAM and the speed of the main storage pool?
And, as a complementary question, would it be easy to move the whole jails dataset to a different pool if necessary? I'm not sure I know exactly how I would go about doing that in a correct way that wouldn't cause the FreeNAS UI to freak out.
