Hi,
I have been running Freenas for about 8 months – and is/was very happy with the performance I get; I use it as iSCSI target for 2 ESXi hosts (my home setup / LAB).
System:
Xeon E3-1230 v3
Motherboard: Asus P9D-M (the SuperMicro boards are not easy to get where I live.)
32GB ECC Mem
2 x IBM ServeRAID M1015 in IT mode
6 x 500GB SSD in RAIDz2 (1 spare)
8 x 4TB HDD in RAIDz3 (1 spare)
2 x 10G NIC for iSCSI
Most of the VMs reside on the all SSD pool – no complaints here.
The HDD was initially intended for my fileserver, templates, and a few other test VMs where performance did not really matter to me.
My ARC hit ratio is probably a bit low (75%) But upping to a Chipset that supports more memory is not really the route I want to go now.
Since I now have several extra VMs on the HDD pool, they sometimes cause extremely bad performance on the fileserver (that could be expected :) ).
I have been playing with IO control in VMWare and that helps, but I would like to minimize / remove any impact the test / ekstra VMs could have on my fileserver
So I looked into adding an SSD to the pool for caching, but from what I have read that would probably not help me.
All VMs are replicated and backed up regularly with Veeam to a separate NAS, and since it is my home setup I can live with having to restore the VMs, but would obviously rather not have to do that to often.
So I was thinking, of splitting the HDDs into two pools.
5 drives in RAIDz2 for the fileserver and templates
3 drives in stripe for the test / ekstra VMs
OR
3 drives in RAIDz1 for the test / ekstra VMs
And then getting and extra disk as “cold spare” (I have not been able to find info if it is possible to have “global” hotspare).
My question is, since we are talking regular 7.2K SATA disks, performance will never be great, but will I have any noticeable performance gain if I stripe the 3 drives compared to RAIDz1?
Or is there another route that would be wiser to achieve my goal?
Thank you in advance for your input.
I have been running Freenas for about 8 months – and is/was very happy with the performance I get; I use it as iSCSI target for 2 ESXi hosts (my home setup / LAB).
System:
Xeon E3-1230 v3
Motherboard: Asus P9D-M (the SuperMicro boards are not easy to get where I live.)
32GB ECC Mem
2 x IBM ServeRAID M1015 in IT mode
6 x 500GB SSD in RAIDz2 (1 spare)
8 x 4TB HDD in RAIDz3 (1 spare)
2 x 10G NIC for iSCSI
Most of the VMs reside on the all SSD pool – no complaints here.
The HDD was initially intended for my fileserver, templates, and a few other test VMs where performance did not really matter to me.
My ARC hit ratio is probably a bit low (75%) But upping to a Chipset that supports more memory is not really the route I want to go now.
Since I now have several extra VMs on the HDD pool, they sometimes cause extremely bad performance on the fileserver (that could be expected :) ).
I have been playing with IO control in VMWare and that helps, but I would like to minimize / remove any impact the test / ekstra VMs could have on my fileserver
So I looked into adding an SSD to the pool for caching, but from what I have read that would probably not help me.
All VMs are replicated and backed up regularly with Veeam to a separate NAS, and since it is my home setup I can live with having to restore the VMs, but would obviously rather not have to do that to often.
So I was thinking, of splitting the HDDs into two pools.
5 drives in RAIDz2 for the fileserver and templates
3 drives in stripe for the test / ekstra VMs
OR
3 drives in RAIDz1 for the test / ekstra VMs
And then getting and extra disk as “cold spare” (I have not been able to find info if it is possible to have “global” hotspare).
My question is, since we are talking regular 7.2K SATA disks, performance will never be great, but will I have any noticeable performance gain if I stripe the 3 drives compared to RAIDz1?
Or is there another route that would be wiser to achieve my goal?
Thank you in advance for your input.
