Testing Freenas on a VM - How do I tell my raid status?

[RichTJ99]

Hi,

I am doing some playing on a test VM with Freenas. I set up a 2gb drive for boot, and two 50gb drives to simulate ZFS. I am just getting started with windows shares & the permissions. Enjoying the process so far.

My goal is a 4-6 drive system in the near future but where can i see my drive status?

Ideally I would like to see both the 50gb in a zfs drive - i just dont know where to look.

Thanks,
Rich

 

[danb35]

The volume status page would be a good start. Go to storage -> click on your pool (the top entry), then click the Volume Status button at the bottom (it looks like a blank sheet of notebook paper).

 

[RichTJ99]

I added 4 more drives via VM. I chose expand volume. Should this be a ZFS drive where i can simulate drive failures?

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Looks like it's working. What's the problem?

 

[jgreco]

It's kind of difficult to simulate meaningful drive failures in a virtualized environment. You can remove a disk, but that's kind of drastic.

 

[solarisguy]

@RichTJ99, will the final system run on hardware or on VM ?

You cannot fully test all the possible scenarios on the other platform (it goes both ways).

 

[RichTJ99]

Hi,

I am going to be using server hardware for the final build. I am looking to get familiar with Freenas in general. Right now I have data floating on 4 different pc's & would love to consolidate it all in one location.

This virtual PC is only for testing. I want to setup Plex, DLNA, and Virtualbox to see how it all works.

Thanks,
Rich

 

[RichTJ99]

Taking this one step further, my VM has 6x 50gb drives

To confirm two drives are for redundancy right?

If I have 6x 4tb WD Red drives I would have a usable 16tb on the pool?

 

[solarisguy]

Taking this one step further, my VM has 6x 50gb drives

To confirm two drives are for redundancy right?

If I have 6x 4tb WD Red drives I would have a usable 16tb on the pool?

Assuming RAID-Z2, with 6 drives, two of them would be exclusively devoted to parity.

User [B]Bidule0hm[/B] developed a tool http://biduleohm.free.fr/zfsraidsarc/ for calculating usable space on ZFS pools, and you have to use it to learn how much disk space you can really use.

Also please read http://blog.delphix.com/matt/2014/06/06/zfs-stripe-width/ to learn that "RAID-Z requires a bit more space for parity and overhead than RAID-4/5/6".

P.S.
I cannot prove it, but I feel that 6 WD Red drives 6TB each would give you a better ROI

 

[jgreco]

Taking this one step further, my VM has 6x 50gb drives

To confirm two drives are for redundancy right?

Yes, or, more specifically, you've got approximately that much space used for parity.

If I have 6x 4tb WD Red drives I would have a usable 16tb on the pool?

No. Your pool size is approximately 16TB, but you shouldn't use all of it. A ZFS system should never have all its space used. 80% used is a reasonable guideline for average fileserver purposes.

 

[RichTJ99]

Next question. I already own a mishmash of drives ranging from 1.5tb to two 8tb enclosures I bought on black Friday.

I have two camera servers which host most of those drives, i also have a HP microserver filled with drives running windows 7 and ps3 media server, and the microserver also has a 4 bay esata enclosure filled.

Basically I have far to much storage with no organization. All the storage is mostly green drives or other 'junk'.

I am hopeful the freenas server will give me a single place to store all my files.

What so people do with the old stuff?

Thanks
Rich

 

[Bidule0hm]

You can re-use the drives in the NAS (probably not all of them though) and/or you can use them to do regular backups of what's on the NAS ;)

 

[jgreco]

You can re-use the drives in the NAS (probably not all of them though) and/or you can use them to do regular backups of what's on the NAS ;)

Give them away to friends. Friends give friends old crappy drives.

Use them as paperweights.

 

[solarisguy]

Were you going to rip apart two 8TB enclosures you just bought?

I would (re-)use the old drives only for backups. Everybody needs backups!

And again would recommend six 6TB WD Red drives.

 

[RichTJ99]

I have a HP NL40 Microserver with 6gb of ram. I wonder if I should pop some of the drives in that box & make it a freenas backup only server as you suggest - rysnc data from the main freenas box to the freenas microserver? That would take care of at least 5 of the drives.

 

[solarisguy]

I have a HP NL40 Microserver with 6gb of ram. I wonder if I should pop some of the drives in that box & make it a freenas backup only server as you suggest - rysnc data from the main freenas box to the freenas microserver? That would take care of at least 5 of the drives.

Good idea. However, for the current FreeNAS version you would need to have 8GB of RAM.

Given that you might have 16GB+ of disks in HP NL40 Microserver, 8GB of RAM is not too much. You can have less RAM with some older version of FreeNAS and UFS (not ZFS), but please solicit advice from the forum about viability of such a deployment. It could be a good match, but you would have two very different interfaces