Setup Suggestions, (R510, 10x600GiB SAS)

[storm121]

Looking for suggestions on the best way to setup freenas on the following Dell R510 server.

This setup will be a dedicated SAN/NAS for two other R510 servers running esxi 5.5.

The two host servers, are running

2 x 2.66 Hex Core
32GiB Ram
Dell H700 SAS Controller
1 x Quad Port NIC
2 x On Board Broadcom NICs


This is the Dell R510 12 bay server, to run FreeNas

1 x 2.4GHz Quad Core
12GiB Ram
Dell H700 SAS RAID Controller with 512MiB and battery backup, I have a 1GiB card as well.
10 x 600GiB SAS 15k drives
1 x HP NC364T PCIe 4Pt Gigabit Server Adapter
2 x On board Network Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5716

I will be installing FreeNas onto a 8GiB SanDisk Cruzer Glide

I'm not sure if I should use the Built In Dell RAID controller to create a RAID or just set all the drives as JBOD and let FreeNas build the RAID.

Since I have both a 1Gib and 512Mib H700 board, would adding a mirrored SSD to the 1GiB board benefit my performance?

I have a single Quad port NIC I plan on using for iSCSI / NFS / vMotion on all 3 servers. My Plan at first is to use a single 48 port switch, vlan those connections off. But will move to a dedicated Switch for those connections.

So...with this info...what suggestions / comments can be offered to get the best performance and usable drive capacity?

Thanks

 

[joelmusicman]

I'm not sure if I should use the Built In Dell RAID controller to create a RAID or just set all the drives as JBOD and let FreeNas build the RAID.

FreeNAS expects to have access to the bare drive, so definitely run JBOD mode. Also check to make sure SMART data is passed through.

Since I have both a 1Gib and 512Mib H700 board, would adding a mirrored SSD to the 1GiB board benefit my performance?

It depends on how you have it set up. Really the only way to know for sure is to benchmark without, then add and benchmark again. Often times ZIL/L2ARC do NOT improve performance...

I have a single Quad port NIC I plan on using for iSCSI / NFS / vMotion on all 3 servers. My Plan at first is to use a single 48 port switch, vlan those connections off. But will move to a dedicated Switch for those connections.

LACP/bonding doesn't usually result in a faster point-to-point connection. Think of it as one car on a one lane road, as opposed to one car on a four lane highway, but the speed limit is the same. You might be able to "add more cars on your highway" by dedicating ports to a VM or something like that though...

So...with this info...what suggestions / comments can be offered to get the best performance and usable drive capacity?

Thanks

Best performance = 5x mirrored pairs = 3TB.
OR
Best capacity & reliability = 10 drive RAIDZ2 = 4.8TB. If you can get an extra drive, go with an 11 drive RAIDZ3 if you want better reliability.

Also, you appear to be misusing the term "GiB" as your drives and memory are usually quoted in GB. For example, I have 3TB drives, but FreeNAS will tell me that it's a 2.7TiB drive (Of course, Windoze will get it wrong by saying it's 2.7TB when it's really TiB!).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte

 

[storm121]

FreeNAS expects to have access to the bare drive, so definitely run JBOD mode. Also check to make sure SMART data is passed through.



It depends on how you have it set up. Really the only way to know for sure is to benchmark without, then add and benchmark again. Often times ZIL/L2ARC do NOT improve performance...


LACP/bonding doesn't usually result in a faster point-to-point connection. Think of it as one car on a one lane road, as opposed to one car on a four lane highway, but the speed limit is the same. You might be able to "add more cars on your highway" by dedicating ports to a VM or something like that though...


Best performance = 5x mirrored pairs = 3TB.
OR
Best capacity & reliability = 10 drive RAIDZ2 = 4.8TB. If you can get an extra drive, go with an 11 drive RAIDZ3 if you want better reliability.

Also, you appear to be misusing the term "GiB" as your drives and memory are usually quoted in GB. For example, I have 3TB drives, but FreeNAS will tell me that it's a 2.7TiB drive (Of course, Windoze will get it wrong by saying it's 2.7TB when it's really TiB!).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte

Thanks for the great info, no 11th drive yet.


Bad habit of using the GiB, TiB to indicate size.