New to Freenas - Connecting 10g options

kjacques1

Dabbler
Joined
May 6, 2019
Messages
14
Hello,

Currently in the midst of setting up a new Freenas system with some old and some new parts. I'm particularly interested in 10g connectivity options. Here's my proposed setup.

Gigabyte Motherboard MB10-DS1 Xeon D-1521
32 gig ECC Ram
5 - 4TB drives - Raid Z2
Chelsio S310E-CR 10


NAS will be directly connected to a Windows 2016 Server via a second Chelsio S310E-CR 10. I would like to use iscsi and have the vm's live on Freenas. Any gotcha's with this set up? Some research suggests that 10g and iscsi is very cpu intensive and the Xeon D-1521 may not be up to the task.

Thanks.
 

rvassar

Guru
Joined
May 2, 2018
Messages
971
I run 10GbE between my FreeNAS box and my ESXi box and use iSCSI for a VM datastore using an i3-2120 CPU on the NAS, my pool is a 2 vdev pair of mirrors, and it's loafing along... CPU load will of course depend on the nature of the work the VM's are performing, but your Xeon D-1521 is almost twice the overall Passmark score of my i3. As long as you're not looking at additional tasks like Plex transcoding, NAS hosted VM's and jails, you'll likely be fine. If anything the limiting factor will be the write rate of your RaidZ2 pool.
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
There's a fair bit of info in the 10 Gig Networking Primer. You might want to check it out.
 

kjacques1

Dabbler
Joined
May 6, 2019
Messages
14
Thanks. I'm having a hard time deciding on redundancy vs performance but lean towards redundancy as a personal preference.
 
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