Doug04
Cadet
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2017
- Messages
- 6
Hello everyone,
At first I need to say that I am using FreeNAS for years, but never got any deeper into it then just setup a storage for some files... so basically I am noob. I did read a lot articles in the last few days but still not sure what's the best way.
My primary job at the company i am working for is our Exchange Organization. Right now i need to find a way to backup our Databases. Currently i have 4 Databases with a total of 4 TB... i expect them to grow to 5 TB in the next few month. This amount of data makes it very difficult to backup in a night.
My current attempt is to use Windows Server Backup (Exchange 2010 is running on 2 Windows 2012 R2 machines, not virtualized). Both Server have a 6 TB iSCSI Disk, which i setup on one FreeNAS Server at our Backup location. Those two locations are connected over a fibrechannel connected to 10G Netgear switches. Server and FreeNAS have a Supermicro X10DRI-T motherboard that comes with 2 10G Intel NICs. This is a dedicated storage network, exclusively for those exchange server, at the moment.
FreeNAS:
Version 9.10.2-U6 (i will try to upgrade to 11 in the next days)
Motherboard: Supermicro X10DRI-T
RAM: 128 GB
CPU: 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz
HDD: 1 x 500GB SATA for Freenas System (i know thats way over the top but i didnt had a smaller one or a usb disk at hand...)
HDD: zpool: Raid-Z1 4 x 6 TB Hitatchi HGST HDN726060ALE614
All Harddrivers are connected to the onboard SATA Connectors.
I created a raid-z1 with two zvols. iSCSI is configured with one portal, one initiator, two targets and two extends. I used device (zvols) for the extends.
One word to this hardware setup. Since i am still testing my options, i took this system, since we got those parts left in our office. I'm aware that I don't need 20 CPU Cores and that 500GB for the FreeNAS boot partition is wasting space. I also have a Intel SSD, that i could use as ZIL/L2ARC, but this is a desktop ssd, no backup battery or anything.
Besides the HDD configuration, the exchange servers have the same hardware.
I did some test backups. Backing up both servers at the same time takes about 26h without the ssd as cache. With the ssd it takes a little less time. Overall i was hopping to get a little more performance out of this setup.
So what are your thoughts about this? Anyone with a similar setup? Any suggestions how i cloud improve the performance? More RAM? I read a lot before writing this, nearly every performance issue on this forum has the suggestion to solve it with more RAM. But i am not sure if in this case it would solve my problems. Maxing out the RAM of the Mainboard would mean 2 TB RAM and i think that cant be the answer... storing almos the hole backup in RAM...
Checking the reportings tab in the web gui i saw that ARC Hit Ratio is about 50% so far away from the suggested 90-100%... since i want to backup to this server, read hits are not that important. That's at least what i think.
My second thought was to increase the amount of hdd's. The way i understand RAIDs is that the more hard drives i use, the faster i can write to the pool. Currently i use a Supermicro chassis and could double the amount of hard drives from 4 to 8.
The third option i can think of is not using iSCSI and use NFS or SMB instead. Note sure if that would speed up those backups.
Maybe someone around here had solved a similar problem.
If you need anymore information please let me know.
Sorry for my bad English, but I think writing this in English, it will reach out to more people.
Greetings
Doug
At first I need to say that I am using FreeNAS for years, but never got any deeper into it then just setup a storage for some files... so basically I am noob. I did read a lot articles in the last few days but still not sure what's the best way.
My primary job at the company i am working for is our Exchange Organization. Right now i need to find a way to backup our Databases. Currently i have 4 Databases with a total of 4 TB... i expect them to grow to 5 TB in the next few month. This amount of data makes it very difficult to backup in a night.
My current attempt is to use Windows Server Backup (Exchange 2010 is running on 2 Windows 2012 R2 machines, not virtualized). Both Server have a 6 TB iSCSI Disk, which i setup on one FreeNAS Server at our Backup location. Those two locations are connected over a fibrechannel connected to 10G Netgear switches. Server and FreeNAS have a Supermicro X10DRI-T motherboard that comes with 2 10G Intel NICs. This is a dedicated storage network, exclusively for those exchange server, at the moment.
FreeNAS:
Version 9.10.2-U6 (i will try to upgrade to 11 in the next days)
Motherboard: Supermicro X10DRI-T
RAM: 128 GB
CPU: 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz
HDD: 1 x 500GB SATA for Freenas System (i know thats way over the top but i didnt had a smaller one or a usb disk at hand...)
HDD: zpool: Raid-Z1 4 x 6 TB Hitatchi HGST HDN726060ALE614
All Harddrivers are connected to the onboard SATA Connectors.
I created a raid-z1 with two zvols. iSCSI is configured with one portal, one initiator, two targets and two extends. I used device (zvols) for the extends.
One word to this hardware setup. Since i am still testing my options, i took this system, since we got those parts left in our office. I'm aware that I don't need 20 CPU Cores and that 500GB for the FreeNAS boot partition is wasting space. I also have a Intel SSD, that i could use as ZIL/L2ARC, but this is a desktop ssd, no backup battery or anything.
Besides the HDD configuration, the exchange servers have the same hardware.
I did some test backups. Backing up both servers at the same time takes about 26h without the ssd as cache. With the ssd it takes a little less time. Overall i was hopping to get a little more performance out of this setup.
So what are your thoughts about this? Anyone with a similar setup? Any suggestions how i cloud improve the performance? More RAM? I read a lot before writing this, nearly every performance issue on this forum has the suggestion to solve it with more RAM. But i am not sure if in this case it would solve my problems. Maxing out the RAM of the Mainboard would mean 2 TB RAM and i think that cant be the answer... storing almos the hole backup in RAM...
Checking the reportings tab in the web gui i saw that ARC Hit Ratio is about 50% so far away from the suggested 90-100%... since i want to backup to this server, read hits are not that important. That's at least what i think.
My second thought was to increase the amount of hdd's. The way i understand RAIDs is that the more hard drives i use, the faster i can write to the pool. Currently i use a Supermicro chassis and could double the amount of hard drives from 4 to 8.
The third option i can think of is not using iSCSI and use NFS or SMB instead. Note sure if that would speed up those backups.
Maybe someone around here had solved a similar problem.
If you need anymore information please let me know.
Sorry for my bad English, but I think writing this in English, it will reach out to more people.
Greetings
Doug
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