I know this is a somewhat redundant question, but I'm struggling trying to decide what to do here and hoped someone could tell me what they have done that is a known stable and working platform.
I build a Supermicro 24 slot server, 16GB RAM, dual Xeon and 24X WD Black 1TB drives... booting from SSD. I originally ran windows 2003 x64 with Starwind as my iscsi target software.
The Supermicro chassis has the 24 port back plane with no expander. I am currently using 3 X IBM MR10is controllers to get all 24 drives in 3 sesperate arrays.
I've taken a liking to FreeNAS because of the replication, price and Starwind support is pretty much useless (and expensive).
I do not need anything with hella-fast i/o, this box is going to be nothing more than a VMware iscsi target for Veeam replication of my critical VMWare clusters (basically backups). It is also in a remote data center.
The problem I have is the RAID controllers I have will not light up the warning lights on the drives when one chokes out, I have someone walk through once a week and check for lights at this data center when they do weekly cleanup at the site so somehow I need to get this working.
So here is what I need to accomplish:
- Reduce this mess to a single RAID controller if possible
- Reduce to a single RAID50 array with all 24 drives
- Be able to have visual indicator lights working on the drives
- Something that FreeNAS can work with and send email alerts when I have a drive failure, faulty battery, or other basic RAID/disk issues.
Setups with this many drives are new to me.. right now I'm wishing I would have got the Supermicro chassis with the expander backplane but I'm stuck with what I have now.
Does anyone have a suggestion on a controller/cables that will help me meet all the above requirements? I was looking at the LSI 9280-24i4e to replace the 3 existing controllers but I don't know if it will integrate seamlessly with BSD/FreeNAS.
Any suggestions you can provide wold be greatly appreciated.. I've been reading and waffling around for a week and now I'm down to the wire on this and need to order parts today if possible, I just don't want to make any more stupid mistakes.
I build a Supermicro 24 slot server, 16GB RAM, dual Xeon and 24X WD Black 1TB drives... booting from SSD. I originally ran windows 2003 x64 with Starwind as my iscsi target software.
The Supermicro chassis has the 24 port back plane with no expander. I am currently using 3 X IBM MR10is controllers to get all 24 drives in 3 sesperate arrays.
I've taken a liking to FreeNAS because of the replication, price and Starwind support is pretty much useless (and expensive).
I do not need anything with hella-fast i/o, this box is going to be nothing more than a VMware iscsi target for Veeam replication of my critical VMWare clusters (basically backups). It is also in a remote data center.
The problem I have is the RAID controllers I have will not light up the warning lights on the drives when one chokes out, I have someone walk through once a week and check for lights at this data center when they do weekly cleanup at the site so somehow I need to get this working.
So here is what I need to accomplish:
- Reduce this mess to a single RAID controller if possible
- Reduce to a single RAID50 array with all 24 drives
- Be able to have visual indicator lights working on the drives
- Something that FreeNAS can work with and send email alerts when I have a drive failure, faulty battery, or other basic RAID/disk issues.
Setups with this many drives are new to me.. right now I'm wishing I would have got the Supermicro chassis with the expander backplane but I'm stuck with what I have now.
Does anyone have a suggestion on a controller/cables that will help me meet all the above requirements? I was looking at the LSI 9280-24i4e to replace the 3 existing controllers but I don't know if it will integrate seamlessly with BSD/FreeNAS.
Any suggestions you can provide wold be greatly appreciated.. I've been reading and waffling around for a week and now I'm down to the wire on this and need to order parts today if possible, I just don't want to make any more stupid mistakes.
