TIL: My FreeNAS implementation needs kicked in the face and rebuilt

[KTrain]

Greetings All,

First of all I'd like to thank those who contribute to the forum. I've learned a lot in just the last few hours. Initially I started browsing the forum for ideas to fix my FreeNAS performance issues, but since have decided to join the community and learn the FreeNAS platform.

As such, I thought I'd share my first days experience as an introduction.

My Deployment: One HP DL360 G5 running FreeNAS. Serving up NFS to a vCenter 5.5 cluster with two HP DL380 G5 hosts. The result, epic fail.

Things I need to fix...

1. The P400i controller in the DL360 G5 doesn't support JBOD... it needs replaced.
2. The P400i is running a 5 drive Raid 5 + hot spare. It's serving up hardware raid to FreeNAS. Complete Fail.
3. Only 8GB of RAM. Didn't really figure it out until I correlated the 7/8th consumption to what my Storage Array is doing.

Things I learned...

1. The nature of NFS will require more hardware to support good performance.
2. People who run iSCSI instead of NFS are Cray' Cray'
3. Intel NICs are important
4. ZIL =/= L2ARC
5. A lot of folks struggle to understand Enterprise hardware and like to complain (what else is new?).

Thanks again for the support!

 

[Nindustries]

Welcome to the forums, enjoy your stay. :)

Choo Choo!

 

[jgreco]

Sounds like he's off to a pretty decent start there though. FreeNAS requires a bit more investment in time and hardware but can really provide some RoI.

 

[KTrain]

I'd like to provide an update.

I've replaced my P400i failraid with an LSI 9211-8i running a RaidZ1 w/ hot spare. I'm using the same disks (6 x 146GB SFF HP Disks). I've also bumped up to 32GB of memory.

Next step is to add a new network card based off an Intel chipset to see what that gets me. My performance is still pretty poor, but I think I'm moving in the right direction. Will advise.

 

[Dusan]

I've replaced my P400i failraid with an LSI 9211-8i running a RaidZ1 w/ hot spare. I'm using the same disks (6 x 146GB SFF HP Disks). I've also bumped up to 32GB of memory.

There is no reason for a spare in this setup. Switch to RAIDZ2 instead -- make the spare a full member of the pool. If a drive fails you do not need to do a replace and wait for resilver to finish. Your pool just goes from 2 drive redundancy to 1 drive redundancy -- as compared to RADIZ1 + spare, where you have to wait for resilver to finish to get back to 1 redundant drive (and if another drive fails during the resilver you pool may be lost). Also, spare will not autoreplace in FreeNAS.

 

[KTrain]

There is no reason for a spare in this setup. Switch to RAIDZ2 instead -- make the spare a full member of the pool. If a drive fails you do not need to do a replace and wait for resilver to finish. Your pool just goes from 2 drive redundancy to 1 drive redundancy -- as compared to RADIZ1 + spare, where you have to wait for resilver to finish to get back to 1 redundant drive (and if another drive fails during the resilver you pool may be lost). Also, spare will not autoreplace in FreeNAS.

Interesting feedback. My choice for a Z1 was based on overhead, not redundancy. I'd prefer the Z2 for the reasons you mentioned above, but since I'm already battling I/O issues I didn't want to introduce more overhead. Since I'm still in a deployment phase I'll definitely keep your feedback in mind. Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[jgreco]

If you're having I/O issues, really, try getting rid of RAIDZ and just go to mirrored.

 

[KTrain]

If you're having I/O issues, really, try getting rid of RAIDZ and just go to mirrored.

That's actually part of my strategy. I have a second system that I plan to setup in a mirrored fashion. This will allow me to have two tiers of storage (one for archiving/backups and one for performance). Since I'm so new to this platform I wanted to try to get one working "correctly" before I setup the second. Ideally, I can figure out the configuration I need (hardware and software), implement it on the second system, swing my datastores over to that, and then finally rebuild the current system as a Z2. It's a lot of theory at this point but it's the direction I'm headed. I've also considered building a new larger system, but don't have confidence in my ability to do it "right" yet. I'm still learning.

Thanks for the feedback jgreco, I agree with your thinking.