I have been building Linux based NAS for many years, both at the home and professional level. I know the limitation of Linux’s software RAID stack and it is now time for something new; FreeNAS + ZFS!
My build is a little complicated and I would love some guidance on what to do.
My current plan: Using ESXi 6.0 (VMWare) to virtualize FreeNAS, then passing FreeNAS the LSI controller so it has real access to all the disks. My big question is: Should I cut off a few GB’s of SSD as a caching layer for the spinning disk array? If I only give the FreeNAS VM 4GB (2GB if i can get away with it) of RAM, I know that dedupe with take a performance hit. Is there any way I can place/force the dedupe table onto the SSD mirror in order to skimp on the RAM? I understand I would be trading performance for RAM and adding more wear and tear on the SSDs.
Performance: Currently I can maintain ~120MB/s on single threaded write while doing backups from my Windows PC to the spinning disks over CIFS on 1Gbit networking. I would like to be able to achieve that with my FreeNAS setup, but not required. VMs and power savings is much more important.
Any guidance on how to set this up would be great.
My build is a little complicated and I would love some guidance on what to do.
- Motherboard SuperMicro X8SI6-F /w onboard LSI 6Gb/s SAS 2008
- Xeon X3470 (4C), 12GB RAM
- 15 port SuperMicro SAS expander backplane
- 7X 5400RPM 2TB WD Green drives, RAID6 (Media/home directories/archives…)
- 2X 240GB SSDs Mirror (VM’s)
- 2X 16GB SLC SSDs, Mirror (Internal, using the onboard Intel SATA controller, OS mirror)
My current plan: Using ESXi 6.0 (VMWare) to virtualize FreeNAS, then passing FreeNAS the LSI controller so it has real access to all the disks. My big question is: Should I cut off a few GB’s of SSD as a caching layer for the spinning disk array? If I only give the FreeNAS VM 4GB (2GB if i can get away with it) of RAM, I know that dedupe with take a performance hit. Is there any way I can place/force the dedupe table onto the SSD mirror in order to skimp on the RAM? I understand I would be trading performance for RAM and adding more wear and tear on the SSDs.
Performance: Currently I can maintain ~120MB/s on single threaded write while doing backups from my Windows PC to the spinning disks over CIFS on 1Gbit networking. I would like to be able to achieve that with my FreeNAS setup, but not required. VMs and power savings is much more important.
Any guidance on how to set this up would be great.