Hey guys. I'm a man of many hats unfortunately and I'm looking to potentially recommend (after a lot of testing) a storage solution at my workplace to my supervisor. I figured I would run it by the community first to get their take on it before I round up the parts to build a test box. The short of the long story is I am helping upgrade a smallish network that when complete will consist of 10ish vms running on two ESXi hosts. Today everything is older dedicated hardware. FYI none of the older hardware is really worth saving for NAS use, already looked into that. At this point all the VMs are being developed using the onboard hard drive, but myself and the rest of the team know this can't be a production solution. Long story short ESXi does not recognize drives in a RAID configuration (PERC S330) so there is no redundancy in the event of a drive failure etc. Bad news in production obviously. Personally I would actually like to get a solution through IXsystems but at the current moment getting anything purchased with the company is difficult, and to be brutally honest if some limited funding comes up there are more important things to do with that money. Fortunately, we have spare parts and pieces around to build with.
Hardware I have been eyeballing that's sitting idle.
1. Newer Dell R630 with a H730 PERC, 8x 2.5" hot swap drive bays, and equipped with dual 16 GB SD cards. The onboard NIC daughter board is 2x 10G SFP+ and 2x 1000BaseT. Not sure of memory but I'm sure it's plenty as in 128GB+. Basically a healthy ESXi platform that is a leftover from another project.
2. 10x+ 1 TB Velociraptor drives (You know the 2.5" drives in the 3.5" Caddy). SATA
3. Number of unused 256 GB SSD Drives SATA
Possible game plan: Install FreeNAS onto the SD cards (will be mirrored), remove the 2.5 Velociraptor drive from the caddy, and install 6x of the Velociraptor drives into the server. Ensure the H730 is in HBA mode per thread I was reading https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...dell-servers-with-perc-h730-controller.46631/ . Create datapool as RaidZ2 with 2x 256GB SSD L2ARC. This would give me roughly 3.5 TB usable which should be plenty for at least a year if not more. This datapool would be replicated off to a backup server on a somewhat regular basis. The NIC daughter board might be a challenge. Its based on the X710 Intel chipset. Didn't see it on the FreeBSD support hardware site, but I did see there are drivers from Intel themselves for the chipset. I've manually had to update drivers on FreeNAS in the past for other projects, so I'm thinking if it doesn't work out of the box I will take a swing at it and seeing what happens. Do have some quad port 1 gig NICs available as a contingency plan.
Thoughts? Concerns? Not necessarily thrilled about using SATA drives, but it's what I got laying around that can get the datapool size to what it would need to be. Also, I was thinking that 1xL2ARC might be ok. If I only used 1 that would let me add another 1TB of storage in the data pool, but not 100% sure if that's wise or not. I don't see us being terribly tight on 3.5 TB, but I'm sure we would figure out something to do with an additional TB particularly if the performance of the NAS wouldn't suffer with only 1 L2ARC. Thanks guys.
Hardware I have been eyeballing that's sitting idle.
1. Newer Dell R630 with a H730 PERC, 8x 2.5" hot swap drive bays, and equipped with dual 16 GB SD cards. The onboard NIC daughter board is 2x 10G SFP+ and 2x 1000BaseT. Not sure of memory but I'm sure it's plenty as in 128GB+. Basically a healthy ESXi platform that is a leftover from another project.
2. 10x+ 1 TB Velociraptor drives (You know the 2.5" drives in the 3.5" Caddy). SATA
3. Number of unused 256 GB SSD Drives SATA
Possible game plan: Install FreeNAS onto the SD cards (will be mirrored), remove the 2.5 Velociraptor drive from the caddy, and install 6x of the Velociraptor drives into the server. Ensure the H730 is in HBA mode per thread I was reading https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...dell-servers-with-perc-h730-controller.46631/ . Create datapool as RaidZ2 with 2x 256GB SSD L2ARC. This would give me roughly 3.5 TB usable which should be plenty for at least a year if not more. This datapool would be replicated off to a backup server on a somewhat regular basis. The NIC daughter board might be a challenge. Its based on the X710 Intel chipset. Didn't see it on the FreeBSD support hardware site, but I did see there are drivers from Intel themselves for the chipset. I've manually had to update drivers on FreeNAS in the past for other projects, so I'm thinking if it doesn't work out of the box I will take a swing at it and seeing what happens. Do have some quad port 1 gig NICs available as a contingency plan.
Thoughts? Concerns? Not necessarily thrilled about using SATA drives, but it's what I got laying around that can get the datapool size to what it would need to be. Also, I was thinking that 1xL2ARC might be ok. If I only used 1 that would let me add another 1TB of storage in the data pool, but not 100% sure if that's wise or not. I don't see us being terribly tight on 3.5 TB, but I'm sure we would figure out something to do with an additional TB particularly if the performance of the NAS wouldn't suffer with only 1 L2ARC. Thanks guys.
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