Questions about FreeNAS

[elementalwindx]

Is it possible to use FreeNAS to do iSCSI and cluster two Windows VM servers running SQL or Exchange.


Also what are the most gigabit network cards in one FreeNAS server that are supported?

And how well does FreeNAS handle the LSI Megaraid cards with 8 Intel SSD drives hooked up to it?


Thanks everybody! :)

 

[elementalwindx]

Is it possible to use FreeNAS to do iSCSI and cluster two Windows VM servers running SQL or Exchange.


Also what are the most gigabit network cards in one FreeNAS server that are supported?

And how well does FreeNAS handle the LSI Megaraid cards with 8 Intel SSD drives hooked up to it?


Thanks everybody! :)

Ok well it looks like it doesn't handle the LSI Megaraid I wanted :(

Can't find an answer on maximum amount of nics

Pretty cool that it does iSCSI.


So uh is this forum....dead?

 

[jgreco]

No, you're just asking questions that indicate you're asking us to provide answers that are in readily available documents, and people aren't necessarily going to jump at the "opportunity" to help you.

There's no practical limit to how many gigabit cards you can have; you can stick 5 quad port cards in a FreeBSD box and it should work. I don't think FreeNAS will have done anything to artificially restrict that, since there's no reason to. FreeBSD has pretty good support for the slightly older LSI stuff. You can read the HCL or the forums to determine what'll work.

 

[elementalwindx]

Is there any specific LSI card that people have used with FreeNAS that would handle say 8 or more SSD hard drives giving them the biggest advantage of SSD?

Anybody tried to benchmark it yet?


after reading for several hours, it seems you guys dislike actual hardware raid cards and prefer HBAs instead. What do you do for battery backup if the power to the freenas was suddenly shut off?

 

[survive]

Hi elementalwindx,

Figure that most of the folks here use FreeNAS as a simple front-end to one or more ZFS pools. ZFS works best if it has direct control over the physical disks, consequently most of use use plain old dumb HBA's and let ZFS do both the volume management & the file systems. With a proper hardware RAID card you usually have to do something like make each drive it's own RAID-0 volume and present the whole mess to FreeNAS, honestly about all that does is lock you into needing to use another (similar) RAID card if yours fails.

For battery backup you would use a stand-alone UPS, the way you would with any system you care about. FreeNAS has support for a number of different makes\models, use one that's supported and FreeNAS can shut the box down if the power outage outlasts the batteries.

Honestly using 8 SSD's for your pool is most likely a waste if you are just using gig-e. Most of your performance will be lost as soon as you hit the network. If you are looking to reduce latency you are still going to have to deal with all the latency inherent to going through the network to reach your storage.

As to your questions in the original post:

Intel NICs are the safe\go-to brand for all things network-related in FreeNAS\FreeBSD. You should check the FreeBSD HCL for 8.2\8.3 (depending on which version you are running) to see if your prefered controller is supported. Odds are, if you are using LSI the controller will be supported, but with FreeBSD it is usually wise to not use the latest & greatest cards as it takes a while for new device support to make it into FreeBSD. FreeNAS is currently running on FreeBSD 8.2 which is one release in the 8.X series behind. You could try the 8.3 beta & see if you have better luck.

One thing you can do with FreeNAS\ZFS is use SSD's as read & write cache. In some cases the addition of these devices can result in dramatic performance increases.

I strongly recommend you take a look at this guide:

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?t=7775

that one of the users put together.

-Will

 

[elementalwindx]

hmmm well I only need around 500GB of usable space. According to that very useful pdf it looks like I would need to add 2 more 30~gb ssd's for the ZIL, and I should max the motherboards memory capability, and maybe more 100GB drives .


I've done a Windows SBS 2011 STD server with a LSI Megaraid using 4 intel ssd's with 4 nics in teaming before and benchmarked atto just under 4GB/sec. Rounding numbers around and being very vague in my math if 4 computers were trying to feed off that server at the same time, it would handle it at around 110MB/sec steady, but if 5 or more computers tried to feed off that server at the same time it would degrade the overall throughput to around 80MB/sec for all computers (say 6 for example). I did test this in reality and 4 computers did get 110MB/sec steady transfer speeds using Windows 7 SMB2.1 to "drag and drop" the files from server to desktop. I did not have more than 4 computers to see if it would divide the throughput to under 110MB/sec though :(

Do you think my method of thinking is correct?


What I want to achieve with this freenas box is the ability for 10 users to be able to feed off this box at the same time and get the max their gigabit connection can stand, and in order to do that I would need 10-12 nics, and the freenas to be able to read/write internally at around 10Gbps. Right?