New to FreeNAS & Storage

[VirtuaMike]

Hello,

Not sure if this is the correct forum to post in, if so please move it :).

Basically we're setting up an OnAPP cloud and are using an iSCSI link for the storage which is ran internally and currently using OpenFiler as the OS/System for the SAN.

We've noticed a quite low connection speed between the Hypervisors and the SAN but each SAN has a NFS mounted partition from the control server. When running a DD from the VM on a HV, 16GB copies at around 98MB/s. When writing from the HV itself to the mounted NFS on the CP server, the write speed returned is 440MB/s.

The SAN block device is powered by 14 256GB Samsung EVO drives in a RAID 6 configuration with no read/write caching.

The NFS is 8x 2TB WDR (Western Digital RED) drives in RAID 10. Can't quite remember if it has read/write enabled on the RAID card or not...

The way we have OpenFiler configured is to have the iSCSI storage block is that it doesn't have a filesystem, just a physical block device. I've been reading around regarding FreeNAS and ZFS and I'd like to try it out to see if we get any better write speeds.

Can anyone give any suggestions on making this as fast as possible? We're using a Supermicro motherboard/BIOS so any suggestions for BIOS settings and any specific FreeNAS settings would be highly appreciated!

Thanks.

 

[VirtuaMike]

Also any RAID configuration suggestions or setups to work well with ZFS will also be highly appreciated!

 

[cyberjock]

To be honest, I don't even know where to start.

- RAID6? Not in this forum. Hardware RAID is a failure waiting to happen.
- EVO drives? Those things have an incredibly short lifespan. And since ZFS is somewhat hard on flash media, you are making a terrible mistake. They don't fit the profile for a good "ZFS" drive in any conceivable way except cheap and will eat your data later.
- You mentioned a RAID card. Very very bad.

My advice is to stop and go back to the drawing board. You've made some critical errors that aren't going to be fixed with software. Your hardware is going to have to change.