Hello All,
I’m reaching out to you all with hopes that I can get some guidance, perhaps even (in some cases) step (baby) step by step assistance in setting up what I hope to be a kick butt NAS…….I am in IT, have been for quite some time, but linux as a whole has always intimidated me…why I’m not certain, it just has. But given what I’m looking to do (build out a rather nice vSphere Home Lab) I think that FreeNAS is definitely a good choice in setting this up for the home lab, as well as for XBMC……
From a hardware perspective, here is what I have, a Super Micro X7DBN W/2 Intel 5150 SL9RU 2.66GHz Procs & 16GB of RAM. For storage I have 4 Seagate ST1000VM002 1TB Hard Drives, and 6 Western Digital WD10EADS 1TB Drives as well. The Seagate’s & 4 of the WD’s will be hanging off of an LSI 8888ELP Controller w/512 MB of RAM, the configuration I plan to use here is the equivalent of JBOD, where I can let FreeNAS (hopefully) coupled with ZFS do their thing……
From a network perspective, I have the Intel 82563EB onboard NIC’s, two dual port BCM5709, and an Intel Pro 1000 Quad Port, my plan is to use iSCSI FreeNAS 9.1 will be installed on a 16GB USB Stick, question now is how do I put it all together…which is to some degree why I’m reaching out here……..
Here’s what I’m thinking, I don’t know if this is even feasible…if it is great, if not perhaps some of you can offer up some alternatives to this design………
Networking:
I would like to leverage the hardware iSCSI capabilities of the BCM’s if I can, my thoughts are this will take a load off of the CPU’s (even though I have two) and perhaps some other parts of the system……can this be done, or should I just stick with the native components built into the system?....if so do I need to do anything special when setting up the iSCSI target….if so can anyone here provide some guidance in doing so? I would also like to leverage the capabilities of my switching infrastructure by implementing LACP or multipath, hopefully doubling the bandwidth between FreeNAS & vSphere hosts.
In terms of Storage
What I would like to do is use the Seagate’s with ZFS1 (which are in a hot swappable cage….I’m segmenting this for vSphere VM’s, as if something goes wrong with a drive and I need to replace it, it should be relatively simple to pull the drive, replace it and let ZFS rebuild) I think will be about 3TB (if my math is right)
The 4 WD’s I would also like to put in a ZFS1 array (again 3TB). The additional 2 drives, I think I will put in a ZFS RAID 0 Array (these will hang off of the SATA ports on the motherboard) now…..given that I have this 3TB & 2TB can any of you offer up some suggestions as to how I could utilize this within my environment? Would turning on some level of replication (where the VM’s stored on the Seagate are automatically copied there), I would like to setup XBMC, would storing my media there be a good option?.....on that note, I use vLAN’s in my environment, would I need to setup a separate network card, and put it in the client vLAN in order to access this content? Or would storing it on the 2TB Raid 0 (which I imagine would be faster than the RAIDZ1) be a better option…….
Either way, if you guys can provide some guidance here……that would be very helpful
I’m reaching out to you all with hopes that I can get some guidance, perhaps even (in some cases) step (baby) step by step assistance in setting up what I hope to be a kick butt NAS…….I am in IT, have been for quite some time, but linux as a whole has always intimidated me…why I’m not certain, it just has. But given what I’m looking to do (build out a rather nice vSphere Home Lab) I think that FreeNAS is definitely a good choice in setting this up for the home lab, as well as for XBMC……
From a hardware perspective, here is what I have, a Super Micro X7DBN W/2 Intel 5150 SL9RU 2.66GHz Procs & 16GB of RAM. For storage I have 4 Seagate ST1000VM002 1TB Hard Drives, and 6 Western Digital WD10EADS 1TB Drives as well. The Seagate’s & 4 of the WD’s will be hanging off of an LSI 8888ELP Controller w/512 MB of RAM, the configuration I plan to use here is the equivalent of JBOD, where I can let FreeNAS (hopefully) coupled with ZFS do their thing……
From a network perspective, I have the Intel 82563EB onboard NIC’s, two dual port BCM5709, and an Intel Pro 1000 Quad Port, my plan is to use iSCSI FreeNAS 9.1 will be installed on a 16GB USB Stick, question now is how do I put it all together…which is to some degree why I’m reaching out here……..
Here’s what I’m thinking, I don’t know if this is even feasible…if it is great, if not perhaps some of you can offer up some alternatives to this design………
Networking:
I would like to leverage the hardware iSCSI capabilities of the BCM’s if I can, my thoughts are this will take a load off of the CPU’s (even though I have two) and perhaps some other parts of the system……can this be done, or should I just stick with the native components built into the system?....if so do I need to do anything special when setting up the iSCSI target….if so can anyone here provide some guidance in doing so? I would also like to leverage the capabilities of my switching infrastructure by implementing LACP or multipath, hopefully doubling the bandwidth between FreeNAS & vSphere hosts.
In terms of Storage
What I would like to do is use the Seagate’s with ZFS1 (which are in a hot swappable cage….I’m segmenting this for vSphere VM’s, as if something goes wrong with a drive and I need to replace it, it should be relatively simple to pull the drive, replace it and let ZFS rebuild) I think will be about 3TB (if my math is right)
The 4 WD’s I would also like to put in a ZFS1 array (again 3TB). The additional 2 drives, I think I will put in a ZFS RAID 0 Array (these will hang off of the SATA ports on the motherboard) now…..given that I have this 3TB & 2TB can any of you offer up some suggestions as to how I could utilize this within my environment? Would turning on some level of replication (where the VM’s stored on the Seagate are automatically copied there), I would like to setup XBMC, would storing my media there be a good option?.....on that note, I use vLAN’s in my environment, would I need to setup a separate network card, and put it in the client vLAN in order to access this content? Or would storing it on the 2TB Raid 0 (which I imagine would be faster than the RAIDZ1) be a better option…….
Either way, if you guys can provide some guidance here……that would be very helpful
