Setting up a multihomed FreeNAS

[Tufkab]

I have all my hardware and I'm starting to setup my network; I've been trying to find info on one specific thing, but I can't seem to find the answers that I'm looking for.

I have a Mikrotik switch with two 10gbe ports; one is for my FreeNAS box, the other for my desktop. I want to keep FreeNAS running strictly as a storage server, so I'll have a second server running Plex, Transmission and a bunch of other stuff.

My idea was to have a dual port 10gbe card in the FreeNAS box. One port would be connected to the switch and the other port would be connected via a direct attach cable to the server running Plex and everything else. The second server would be connected to the FreeNAS box via the direct attach, but it would also be connected to the switch via normal gigabit port.

My thinking is that I would separate storage traffic and user traffic. For example, if Plex is streaming out a couple of movies, I don't want it pulling in data through the same gigabit port that it's sending data back out from again. I would like for it to pull the movie from the FreeNAS share over the 10gbe connection and serve it out over the gigabit connection. Likewise for Transmission; I'd prefer if it pulled in data from the gigabit port and then just wrote it to the shared folder through the 10gbe connection.

Is this even doable? Would it just be a case of setting up a separate private subnet between the two and adding a static route between the two? Am I just creating a very unstable situation for no good reason?

 

[dlavigne]

Were you able to find the answer to this?

 

[depasseg]

Yes it's doable, in fact this is the way enterprise systems are setup (separate storage network), but I wouldn't bother. Even if you took an 8Gb (hour long show), and streamed it into to Plex that would be an average rate of 20 megabits/sec and at full resolution it would be another 20 Mb/s out. Your gigabit connection is full duplex, so you can simultaneously handle 1000 Mb/s in and out at the same time. Your plex server will run out of CPU before you saturate your 1 Gig link.

 

[rogerh]

It should work. Provided you have no reason to try and send external traffic from the Plex/FreeNAS subnet. All machines would have their default gateway on the other subnet. No particular routing rule is required, but the applications on the Plex server would have to be set to only use the FreeNAS IP on the wanted subnet for connecting to storage, routing would follow from this.