leonroy
Explorer
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2012
- Messages
- 77
We've rolled our own Debian+Samba+Active Directory NAS boxes for a while now but the man power required to configure and maintain them is becoming a little too much.
We've tried a few NAS distros in vmware and FreeNAS seems the best. That said before proceeding with wiping one of our NAS boxes and putting FreeNAS on it I wanted to run the setup by the folks here:
Our old Debian setup has been rock solid, but apart from being tricky to build and manage its CIFS performance has been pitiful (40MB/s up/down). We use CIFS and NFS mainly with a few clients reliant on AFP. Our old setup has two RAID partitions, one a 4x disk RAID 10 array for vmware hosts over NFS, and the other a large user data volume for Windows roaming profiles.
With FreeNAS I know a simpler storage controller is better but we'd prefer to keep the Adaptec we have unless there's a big advantage to be had?
In fact would we be better off using the hardware RAID controller's own RAID or should we use it as JBOD with ZFS across it?
If so what sort of volumes structure would be best suited with ZFS and a RAID 10 type level of redundancy?
Edit: to add, we have a daily backup executing to an identical server so whilst a high level of redundancy is good, it's not absolutely paramount.
We've tried a few NAS distros in vmware and FreeNAS seems the best. That said before proceeding with wiping one of our NAS boxes and putting FreeNAS on it I wanted to run the setup by the folks here:
- Chassis: Supermicro SC836
- Motherboard: Supermicro X7DBE-X
- CPU: 2x Intel Xeon 5150
- RAM: 8GB
- RAID: Adaptec 31605 RAID Controller
- HD: 16x 1TB Samsung F3
Our old Debian setup has been rock solid, but apart from being tricky to build and manage its CIFS performance has been pitiful (40MB/s up/down). We use CIFS and NFS mainly with a few clients reliant on AFP. Our old setup has two RAID partitions, one a 4x disk RAID 10 array for vmware hosts over NFS, and the other a large user data volume for Windows roaming profiles.
With FreeNAS I know a simpler storage controller is better but we'd prefer to keep the Adaptec we have unless there's a big advantage to be had?
In fact would we be better off using the hardware RAID controller's own RAID or should we use it as JBOD with ZFS across it?
If so what sort of volumes structure would be best suited with ZFS and a RAID 10 type level of redundancy?
Edit: to add, we have a daily backup executing to an identical server so whilst a high level of redundancy is good, it's not absolutely paramount.