Replacing an abomination

[lukeren]

My current setup consists of a Windows 10 running 6 x 3TB WD Red connected to an Adaptec 5805 (I know, I was young and foolish...) in RAID 5. The machine runs Hyper-V and has a Windows Server VM and a Linux VM. The Windows 10 runs a mix of services and has done so for a good long time.

Replacing the above 1:1 is not (I think?) possible, since there's no virtualization support in FreeNAS. I'd like to move the storage to something new though. The disks are getting up there in age, and I don't really trust them at all.

I was thinking of getting these components:

Supermicro X11SSM-F Link
1 x Kingston KVR21E15D8/16 Link
Xeon E3-1220 v5 (v6 doesn't seem to be available yet?) Link
4 x WD Red 6TB Link

I plan on running the above in raidz. I know It's not recommended to use raidz, but I'm ok with the risk. I also know it's not recommended to use 4 drives for raidz, but as far as I can gather, that's only a performance issue, not safety of data (please correct me if I'm wrong!).

Bonus question:
I'm currently running a test of FreeNAS on an hp Microserver (the N54L) booting from a USB pen. As I've understood, and what's also part of the reason I'm looking into this, I can move this setup (disks and USB pen) to the above hardware and just boot it up there, jails and everything in place?

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I don't see any obvious issues, assuming you've verified component compatibility.

There's no reason for concern about performance with 4 disks in RAIDZ1. Be sure to implement a suitable backup strategy for all the data you care about.

EDIT: And yes, you can move the boot and data drives from one machine to another without any obstacles beyond the possibility of having to reconfigure the network settings.

 

[joeschmuck]

I plan on running the above in raidz. I know It's not recommended to use raidz, but I'm ok with the risk. I also know it's not recommended to use 4 drives for raidz, but as far as I can gather, that's only a performance issue, not safety of data (please correct me if I'm wrong!).

Well I'm not entirely sure that you understand the risk of running a RAIDZ1 using 6TB hard drives, but maybe you do. I'll spell it out anyway just in case you don't. If you have a failure of a single hard drive then your data will still be available, I'm pretty sure you understand this point. The troubles come when you remove the failed drive and install a new drive and resilvering starts. Depending on how much data you have it could take days to resilver your new drive. If you by chance have another drive failure during this period of time then you lose all your data. This is why we recommend that if you are using 4TB drives or larger to use a RAIDZ2 minimum. Of course we recommend a RAIDZ2 all the time, it's just the way we roll.

If you do have a backup of all your important data elsewhere then you would be fine if the failure did happen while resilvering.

since there's no virtualization support in FreeNAS.

I don't understand the comment. Are you saying no virtualization in FreeNAS or that FreeNAS isn't supported by virtualization? There is virtualization support both ways but maybe not what you desire. VM's in FreeNAS is fairly new.

 

[lukeren]

Regarding the risk, I know how it breaks down, but thanks for spelling it out :)
None of what is on this system is data that's important. It would suck if I lost it, but not so much so I'd want to spend money for another disk so I could run z2.

I don't understand the comment. Are you saying no virtualization in FreeNAS or that FreeNAS isn't supported by virtualization? There is virtualization support both ways but maybe not what you desire. VM's in FreeNAS is fairly new.

What I meant was, from what I've read, you can't run VM's that require a graphical UI (Windows) in bhyve, which is what I've come to understand is the hypervisor available.
Is this not true? Would I be able to run a Windows VM on FreeNAS?

 

[Jailer]

Would I be able to run a Windows VM on FreeNAS

Certainly, you just have to use a client like VNC viewer to access the GUI.

 

[lukeren]

Certainly, you just have to use a client like VNC viewer to access the GUI.

Oh, awesome. VNC sucks, but who cares, it'll only be used during the installation.
This just made it all that more awesome ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

VNC is the default I believe but once you have Windows running you could use other remote accessing tools like TeamViewer or NoMachine. I just started using NoMachine, it's pretty nice.