Hello everyone.
I'm new to FreeNAS and this community, I hope you go easy on me :). I've read some recommendations concerning hardware, FreeBSD and FreeNAS in general and have come up with this:
Background
I'm new to FreeNAS and this community, I hope you go easy on me :). I've read some recommendations concerning hardware, FreeBSD and FreeNAS in general and have come up with this:
Background
- I'm a computer science student almost done with my master's degree with an all-in-all IT-experience in several fields of about 10 years.
- I didn't work with FreeNAS yet but have some years of experience with Linux systems setting them up as web-/mail-/voicechat-/etc.-servers, also in form of VMs via Proxmox VE.
- I didn't work with ZFS yet at all. All information I do have about it is what I've read about it on these forums (especially the great FAQs and presentations).
- I do understand that FreeNAS alone, without an additional backup strategy, is not an appropriate solution to keep data safe.
- I do understand that FreeNAS needs server-grade hardware and at least 8GB ECC-RAM to work reliably.
- I do understand that FreeNAS should be operated with a UPS to exclude data corruption due to power outages.
- I'm an IT-consultant for a lawyer office and they desperately need a good NAS-solution.
- Right now they're using an ultra-low-end Buffalo NAS which was on RAID-0 when I first looked at it. It managed to transfer a brutal 4MByte/s and could go haywire any second.
- No backup strategy was used at all, so I at least turned that NAS to RAID-1 and recommended an entirely different solution.
- The lawyer office will use the NAS-function for storing delicate data of their clients. I tend to encrypt it via geli. Windows and OS X machines will use the server as network storage.
- Right now there should be 10 simultaneous users for the local network storage tops.
- FreeNAS needs decent hardware to run reliably so I thought we could as well make it run jails that act as a webserver (either LAMP-stack with Webmin or lightweight with nginx), mailserver and groupware (Horde).
- External backup-target via NFS for some of my own stuff, single user.
- CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1245v5 Boxed
- Mainboard: SuperMicro X11SAE-M
- RAM: 4 x Crucial 16GB DDR4-2133 ECC (CT16G4WFD8213)
- HDD: 5 x WD Red 3TB (WD30EFRX) + 1 8TB Backup-HDD
- Chassis: Corsair Obsidian 650D (used, in good condition)
- SSD: Samsung 850 Evo 250GB M.2
- Hot-Swap: 5.25" to 3.5" SATA hot-swap slot
- UPS: APC Back-UPS Pro BR900G-GR
- PSU: Platimax 500W Enermax (80plus Platinum)
- CPU: Maximum HT Xeon E3 v5 with iGPU (if the need for GPU-acceleration may arise)
- Mainboard: (Hopefully enough) server-grade mainboard with
- dual Gigabit-Ethernet
- 8xSATA
- M.2-slot (due to PCIe should not occupy one of the 8x SATA-ports, right?)
- digital video output
- RAM: DDR4-ECC unbuffered RAM is very pricy. This one seems to have enough bang for the buck.
- HDD: On these forums WD Red HDDs were recommended a lot. 4 of the 5 HDDs will be used in RAID-Z2 (2 + 2) and the 5th will be used as spare for instant resilvering if the need may arise. The 8TB Backup-HDD will be used in the hot-swap slot for an externally stored backup of the zpool. This way 6 SATA-ports will be occupied at all times. (4 for the vdev, 1 for the spare and 1 for the hot-swap-slot) The 3TB WD Red HDDs have the better GByte per Euro-ratio than the 4TB WD Red HDDs right now for me.
- Chassis: Nothing special. I just happen to have a spare Corsair Obsidian 650D left and it should work well as a chassis.
- SSD: There were a lot of discussions whether to use USB or SATA DOM or SSD. Since the mainboard supports M.2 I thought of using an M.2 SSD, so as to not occupy a SATA port. For now I didn't want to use it as L2ARC (and for sure not as ZIL, since I don't have a mirror) but only as a boot drive. I may do that in the future, though, so I chose 250GB as the size.
- Hot-Swap: I read that backing up to external USB is discouraged because of bad behaviour concerning SMART and so on. You guys encouraged using eSATA but I don't have eSATA on this board. My solution is thus using a hot-swap slot that is connected to a SATA-port.
- UPS: I'm not sure about the chosen dimension of the UPS. All it should do is be big enough to let the server shut down properly as soon as possible after a power outage. From what I could calculate, this guy should hopefully be big enough.
- PSU: The server will run 24/7 so the PSU needs to have a good efficiency. Thus it will be platinum-grade.
- Did I mess up somewhere with my build idea under the context of the intended use? How would you rate my build overall?
- Is the backup strategy rigid enough, so the chance of losing all data is relatively low? (RAID-Z2 + ONE external regular backup) If not, what would you guys propose? What would you guys think is rigid enough for a lawyer office?
- Is it wrong to plan using a FreeNAS server simultaneously as a server for other services? (Web/Mail/Groupware) I've read that there are other people using jails for this purpose successfully.
- In this context, is it clever to use one of the ethernet ports for the local network storage-purpose and the other ethernet port for the jails?
- How much RAM should I feed FreeNAS with, so I can use the rest for the jails?
- I don't think I will need deduplication at first but if I do so later, can I just activate it?
- I know expanding the vdev is possible by resilvering with bigger hard drives without changing their numbers, but what if I use the external backup? Remove the zpool, create a new vdev with more or less HDDs and put the data from the backup back in. Would this work?