My Planned FreeNAS + ESXi Implementation - Need Inputs!!

[sbnetadmin]

Hello All!

So we're a small office and we currently have 2 x ESXi Servers running with 3 gigabit NICs each (on-board + dual PCI express). These ESXi servers run about 10 VMs each so in total about 20 VMs.

I am looking into adding a new FreeNAS box to allow for HA, quick migrations, native share and backups.

My planned FreeNAS implementation is as follows:

• Motherboard - ASUS M5A99X (1 NIC + 3 PCI Express)
• CPU - AMD Athlon II X2
• RAM - 4 GB DDR 3 1333 MHz
• RAID - 2 x Highpoint 2720 SGL
• NIC - Quad PCI express gigabit NIC
• Drives - 8 x 2 TB WD Black Caviar
• Storage - 2 x 4 Bay External Enclosures with Hot Swap

Since this is my first time building a FreeNAS box for an ESXi environment, I was hoping to get some feedback as to the concerns / limitations / potential issues etc with the setup I have mentioned above.

Thanks a lot everyone!

 

[jgreco]

1) Get yourself a chassis capable of internalizing all your intended storage. That might mean a rack mountable unit, but not necessarily. But you really don't need the tears of "my pool failed when someone bumped a cable!"

2) If you are talking storage vMotion, you will be frustrated by how long it takes. You can make it go a bit faster with a better CPU, but adding an SSD or a pair of mirrored SSD's for storage vMotion is suggested.

3) Don't use NFS unless you add a ZIL to the mix. ESXi likes its sync writes. Mirrored ZIL recommended.

4) Don't cheap out on memory. Stuff's dirt cheap. Get at least 8. 16 is good. ZFS thrives on memory.

5) The quad NIC is probably not too helpful since you're not likely to be able to take advantage of five gigE ports without some careful design. Especially with a low end consumer CPU.

6) Be sure to read the stuff I wrote about in bug 1531 for performance tuning. In a happy accident it is also largely relevant to other sharing protocols.

 

[tingo]

More RAM, always add as much RAM as you can!
IMHO, if you are building a FreeNAS box for personal use (yourself) today, it should have at least 8 GB RAM. If you are building a FreeNAS box that will be used by more than one person simultaneously, it should have at least 16 GB RAM.
And this is without turning on the dedup feature.

 

[BobCochran]

I agree with the above responses. I have 2 x 5 bay external drive bays myself. It is a pain walking around them carefully. A Norco case is a better deal and what I should have gotten for my own NAS. I like the SuperMicro motherboard, ECC memory, and AMD Opteron processor I'm using at this time. You are probably going to need a managed network switch.