mikesoultanian
Dabbler
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2017
- Messages
- 43
Hi,
Thanks to everyone that's been helping me so far to understand FreeNAS - it's been much appreciated!
So, I'm going to start reworking our storage because it's currently a huge mess of drives of different sizes, types, multiple volumes, even more zvols, and it just led to different admins moving VMs all over the place and making a general disaster out of things.
Right now I have 24 1TB SSDs and I plan to make one big RAID 10 volume for that - if I can get the $$, I'll add another 24 1TB SSDs, but if not, I'll upgrade the installed HDDs instead (we have 80 slots available in the JBOD)..... So, I currently have a bunch of 600GB HDDs and 1TB HDDs and even some 240GB drives - the goal is the replace all of the 600GB and 240GB HDDs and standardize on 1TB HDDs as we just need to have things more uniform. These are 2.5" drive bays so it also makes drive selection a bit more tricky. So, here's about how things are currently set up:
- SSDs are on one volume which is split into two 5TB RAID 10 zvols.
- HDDs are just a mess of Volumes and I don't even care how they're configured because I'm going to wipe everything off of them. There is no important data on the HDD volumes.
CLEANING UP THE SSD VOLUME
For the first step I'm thinking that I'll consolidate the two 5TB SSD zvols to be one large one - well, actually two zvols, a small 1GB zvol for the Hyper-V witness, and one large zvol for all the VM data. We're going to back up everything tonight, but I still want to be 100% sure I'm deleting the correct zvol. Is there a way for me to browse the files from within FreeNAS so as to confirm which zvol has files and which doesn't? When I look at the iSCSI connection in Windows, I'm kinda able to match up the LUN number with the target, which then matches up to the extent, which I can then associate with a zvol, which I can then match up with a volume, so I think I figured out which is which, but it's still tricky and so many layers away from the storage that it would be nice to have a one-to-one match as to where my files are - I'm thinking making an SMB share would be another way to confirm. When I go into /mnt, I see the volumes, but when I traverse into those folders there are no subfolders or anything that resembles my files.
I guess another way to do this would be if I could easily (and non-destructively) disable the zvol/extent/target to verify that the drive that I expect to be gone in Windows is truly gone and there isn't a cross-up somewhere? If I understand correctly, I can delete an extent, but I can't delete a zvol without losing my files.
EXTENDING THE SSD VOLUME
Once I've removed one of the two 5TB SSD zvol, I would like to extend the zvol and associated extent (which currently has data on it). According to "10.5.9.1. Zvol Based LUN", I can edit the zvol and extend it to the full 10TB. Once I do that, according to "10.5.9.2. File Extent Based LUN" I'll then need to extend the Extent using this command: "truncate -s +2g /mnt/volume1/data" - obviously changing the parameters to match my setup. What is weird, though, is that in my /mnt/[myvolume] folder, there is no "data" folder, so I'm not sure how that'd work...
CLEANING UP THE HDD VOLUME
As for the HDD side, I'm just going to wipe out all the volumes and then create a large RAID 10 volume of the HDDs. I'll create a new zvol for that storage and then make it available over iSCSI like above.
As I purchase new 1TB drives (SSD or HDD), I'll add them to their respective volume, extending them accordingly.
Does anyone see any glaring issues that I'll run into? From all the reading it seems like this is possible, it's just the extending part that I'm nervous about. I created a FreeNAS VM so I'm testing this stuff out there as well to get a better feel for how things work.
Thanks!
Thanks to everyone that's been helping me so far to understand FreeNAS - it's been much appreciated!
So, I'm going to start reworking our storage because it's currently a huge mess of drives of different sizes, types, multiple volumes, even more zvols, and it just led to different admins moving VMs all over the place and making a general disaster out of things.
Right now I have 24 1TB SSDs and I plan to make one big RAID 10 volume for that - if I can get the $$, I'll add another 24 1TB SSDs, but if not, I'll upgrade the installed HDDs instead (we have 80 slots available in the JBOD)..... So, I currently have a bunch of 600GB HDDs and 1TB HDDs and even some 240GB drives - the goal is the replace all of the 600GB and 240GB HDDs and standardize on 1TB HDDs as we just need to have things more uniform. These are 2.5" drive bays so it also makes drive selection a bit more tricky. So, here's about how things are currently set up:
- SSDs are on one volume which is split into two 5TB RAID 10 zvols.
- HDDs are just a mess of Volumes and I don't even care how they're configured because I'm going to wipe everything off of them. There is no important data on the HDD volumes.
CLEANING UP THE SSD VOLUME
For the first step I'm thinking that I'll consolidate the two 5TB SSD zvols to be one large one - well, actually two zvols, a small 1GB zvol for the Hyper-V witness, and one large zvol for all the VM data. We're going to back up everything tonight, but I still want to be 100% sure I'm deleting the correct zvol. Is there a way for me to browse the files from within FreeNAS so as to confirm which zvol has files and which doesn't? When I look at the iSCSI connection in Windows, I'm kinda able to match up the LUN number with the target, which then matches up to the extent, which I can then associate with a zvol, which I can then match up with a volume, so I think I figured out which is which, but it's still tricky and so many layers away from the storage that it would be nice to have a one-to-one match as to where my files are - I'm thinking making an SMB share would be another way to confirm. When I go into /mnt, I see the volumes, but when I traverse into those folders there are no subfolders or anything that resembles my files.
I guess another way to do this would be if I could easily (and non-destructively) disable the zvol/extent/target to verify that the drive that I expect to be gone in Windows is truly gone and there isn't a cross-up somewhere? If I understand correctly, I can delete an extent, but I can't delete a zvol without losing my files.
EXTENDING THE SSD VOLUME
Once I've removed one of the two 5TB SSD zvol, I would like to extend the zvol and associated extent (which currently has data on it). According to "10.5.9.1. Zvol Based LUN", I can edit the zvol and extend it to the full 10TB. Once I do that, according to "10.5.9.2. File Extent Based LUN" I'll then need to extend the Extent using this command: "truncate -s +2g /mnt/volume1/data" - obviously changing the parameters to match my setup. What is weird, though, is that in my /mnt/[myvolume] folder, there is no "data" folder, so I'm not sure how that'd work...
CLEANING UP THE HDD VOLUME
As for the HDD side, I'm just going to wipe out all the volumes and then create a large RAID 10 volume of the HDDs. I'll create a new zvol for that storage and then make it available over iSCSI like above.
As I purchase new 1TB drives (SSD or HDD), I'll add them to their respective volume, extending them accordingly.
Does anyone see any glaring issues that I'll run into? From all the reading it seems like this is possible, it's just the extending part that I'm nervous about. I created a FreeNAS VM so I'm testing this stuff out there as well to get a better feel for how things work.
Thanks!
