FREENAS HA / Clustering configuration

[François YACOB]

Hello all,

I am looking for some helps to set up the following configuration :
- i want to set up 2 FREENAS boxes :
- the first FREENAS box will be the main boxes and will have high speed disks mainly SSD and SAS disks
- the second FREENAX box will be the failover box (cheaper disks, probably SATA)
The boxes will be in a replication cluster (active / passive)
The boxes will serve Vmware ESX hosts (5 hosts) with iSCSI or NFS (no specific requirements)

- i want to address the following problem :
- if i update my main box (security update, patch, or hardware firmware) and need to reboot it, prior to the reboot i want to be able to switch / force the iSCSI/NFS traffic to go to the second FREENAS box.
- after the reboot, if want to manually go back the traffic to the main box

My question is :
- does anyone know if it is possible ? can i manually request a failover to the second box and let the 2 FREENAS trigger a last replication operation (suspending the I/O on the vmware hosts) , then when the second box is in sync, switch the NFS IP or second IP iSCSI portal to the second box ?

Thanks for your response,
François

 

[Robert Smith]

Have you looked at Virtual NAS/SAN solutions of any kind?

With five hosts is looks like you would have pretty good redundancy, without the need to manage and integrate two additional servers.

 

[François YACOB]

Hi Robert,

Thank you for your reply. Yes, i have looked for some virtual SAN (like Vmware VSAN, OpenVStorage, Starwinds) but my hardware doesn't suit very well for virtual SAN.
I am using DELL Blade servers (M620 blades with only 2 disk slots) whereas the FREENAS boxes will be a R720xd and a R730xd (up to 24/26 disk slots). I don't know yet if the FREENAS will be installed on top of a vmware host or on the barely metal server.

François

PS : by the way, I have already had one of the 2 servers (the R720xd)

 

[cyberjock]

There is no active/passive HA features for FreeNAS without significant hacking of the OS. That feature is a TrueNAS exclusive.