Tuning FreeNAS suggestions for a newbie

[thecoffeeguy]

Greetings folks.
I will try to get to the point, but let me explain how I got here.
I originally set out to play around with FreeNAS in my home lab (2 ESXi servers running test/dev stuff for work).
I wanted to build my own NAS as I enjoy tinkering around and found it more cost effective than a off the shelf purchase.

Anyway, as my lab continued to evolve and grow, where as FreeNAS was more of a luxury for my lab, now it is turning into a necessity. It has forced me to rethink how I want to use it moving forward, make it better. That said:

I am currently on 11.2U-7. I run FreeNAS off a USB stick.
Everything has been good so far except for a degraded drive that I replaced recently.

Now, I have been thinking a lot about performance for my FreeNAS as I have a share setup to my ESXi hosts over NFS and drop my VMs there.
My main hope in asking the folks here is, how do I get/maintain performance for my VM's running off my FreeNAS? This is where I am really new and delving into new territory and I plan to google a lot these next days. In the meantime, I thougth i would ask here.

Specs on my FreeNAS server:
Intel Pentium 3.2ghz 2 core
16gb memory
(2) 2TB WD Red Drives (I plan to buy more drives shortly)
Dual onboard NIC
Added Intel NIC (2 slots)

Nothing fancy, but it works for the moment.
However, my instincts are telling me I need to start thinking ahead.

Appreciate all the help.
Thank you!

TCG

 

[MikeyG]

Are you looking for software tuning of some kind? Or suggestions for how to increase performance? How does it perform now?

Everything about the specs you share is relatively low performance and could be upgraded. A dual core CPU (you don't specify which one) might turn into a bottleneck. I think at least 32GB of memory is recommended for block storage, but the more the better. Assuming your drives are a mirrored vdev, adding more vdevs would increase IOPs.

If it were me I'd probably add vdevs and memory, then keep an eye on CPU in case it's a problem. Might be fine for 1Gb.

If you are just hoping not to lose performance, a frequent suggestion is keeping storage utilization below 50% for zvols.

 

[thecoffeeguy]

Are you looking for software tuning of some kind? Or suggestions for how to increase performance? How does it perform now?

Everything about the specs you share is relatively low performance and could be upgraded. A dual core CPU (you don't specify which one) might turn into a bottleneck. I think at least 32GB of memory is recommended for block storage, but the more the better. Assuming your drives are a mirrored vdev, adding more vdevs would increase IOPs.

If it were me I'd probably add vdevs and memory, then keep an eye on CPU in case it's a problem. Might be fine for 1Gb.

If you are just hoping not to lose performance, a frequent suggestion is keeping storage utilization below 50% for zvols.

hello and thanks for the response.
Honestly, I was thinking a little bit of both hardware and software. I actually decided late last night after I send this out, just to max out the memory the board will support. I should get the additional 32gb soon. The CPU, is older, so I will start shopping for that.

I did a quick look at my setup (still learning the nuts and bolts of FreeNAS, and pretty sure my pool with my two disks is mirror (says mirror...ahaha).
I also have that NIC card, with 2 NICs on it. I thought about plugging that in and setting up LACP for link aggregation. I figure, why not?

I plan to do some more digging as the reality is I need to learn more. I figured in the meantime, maybe ask the folks in the communit what they would recommend.
Is there anything else I should consider?
VM wise, probably say i would be running no more than 30ish VM's. Nothing crazy by any means. Mostly lots of small instances, with the occasional bigger one.

Appreicate the help!

TCG

 

[John Doe]

have you thought about an SSD for the VMs?

 

[thecoffeeguy]

have you thought about an SSD for the VMs?

you mean SSD within ESXi? or SSD's inside FreeNAS?

 

[John Doe]

you mean SSD within ESXi? or SSD's inside FreeNAS?

i have choosen 2 mirrored SSDs, as the datasource for the VMs. so I created a pool within freenas, an NFS share and passed this to ESXi.

I actually used the most parts of this how to link

advantage with this is, that you can use all the fancy features of freenas, like snapshots.
disadvantage is, whenever freenas is switched off and the VM os is not able to run completly on the memory, you might lose data.

i forgot to shut off a debian vm, did a freenas update and the debian vm got corupted. no problem, i could recover the snapshot but anyway, additional work has to be made.