I'm hoping that within the next year I'll be able to expand my lab to have two hypervisor hosts and a storage (FreeNAS) server. Unfortunately that's a year away and I have storage pain (not enough storage!) now. My current server is a Lenovo TS440 YUX model (Lenovo RAID 500 card, 8 drive bays) with 32 GB ECC RAM. Currently the server is running ESXi.
If I can actually expand my lab in the future, I'll turn the Lenovo into a dedicated FreeNAS server providing storage to two ESXi (or other hypervisor) hosts. Until then I'm stuck with doing everything on one server.
Since I only have the one server, and I have to redo my storage layout now, I'm pondering trowing a small disk on the Lenovo's SATA controller to provide storage for a FreeNAS VM with the RAID controller passed through to the VM. Once the FreeNAS VM is booted FreeNAS would serve up the RAID/HBA's storage to ESXi via an internal iSCSI or NFS network.
Disk wise I currently have two 3TB disks and two 2TB disks. I'm planning on adding an additional four 2TB disks to use up all 8 of the drive bays attached to the RAID controller.
A few things I haven't figured out:
If I can actually expand my lab in the future, I'll turn the Lenovo into a dedicated FreeNAS server providing storage to two ESXi (or other hypervisor) hosts. Until then I'm stuck with doing everything on one server.
Since I only have the one server, and I have to redo my storage layout now, I'm pondering trowing a small disk on the Lenovo's SATA controller to provide storage for a FreeNAS VM with the RAID controller passed through to the VM. Once the FreeNAS VM is booted FreeNAS would serve up the RAID/HBA's storage to ESXi via an internal iSCSI or NFS network.
Disk wise I currently have two 3TB disks and two 2TB disks. I'm planning on adding an additional four 2TB disks to use up all 8 of the drive bays attached to the RAID controller.
A few things I haven't figured out:
- Is the minimum 8 GB of RAM enough? I'm a bit tight on available memory on this server. I'll add more memory to FreeNAS as data is migrated from Linux Samba file servers to FreeNAS, but I'll have to start with the minimum 8 GB.
- Can the Lenovo RAID 500 be flashed into IT mode? Based on what I've read so far it is a re-branded LSI 9240-8i. In ESXi lspci identifies it as LSI / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS SKINNY Controller so I haven't been able to confirm that. Going to shut down and open the case tonight to see if I can confirm that.
- Would FreeNAS and the flashing the LSI card to IT mode help write performance? This card doesn't have any write cache so it's RAID performance is rather poor.
- If things go as planned will it be easy to move FreeNAS from a VM to the native OS on the Lenovo server?
- Does FreeNAS allow running services such as CUPS and SANE (Scanner Access Made Easy)? More memory I can give to FreeNAS if so.