brianmills
Cadet
- Joined
- May 17, 2012
- Messages
- 8
Hi, I've been exploring setting up a NAS using OpenFiler or FreeNAS. I've explored OpenFiler separately, and I'm now looking into FreeNAS 8. I'm technical but no little about FreeNAS. I intend to use it for a variety of things, I run a small business, and I already have a dozen or so VM's setup for various things in our office (dev/test environments, build servers, software tools etc).
So I expect to use:
- NFS shares (for server data shares)
- SMB shares (for windows pc's data and backups)
- AD for user management (already setup, just hooking up the NAS/Filer too it)
- possibly iSCSI for VM's to reside on
- AFP (I have 2 mac's as well) and I dont believe OpenFiler supports this.
- The main reason for trying FreeNAS as well as it all runs at home, so I'd like to be able to use some of the multimedia features once they come back into v8 in the future
I have an old 1366pin i7 Asus based machine with 7 SATA ports I intend to use for the task (one day I might upgrade/downgrade it to an Ivy/Sandy bridge based i3 system)
My intention with was to:
- Run FreeNAS of a USB drive
- 8GB Ram already in the existing machine
- 4 * 2TB Green drives in a ZFS Array (sorry I might not have the terminology quite right here).
- 1 * 1TB or 2TB ZFS mirrored drives for iSCSI area or VM machine backup
- 2 Nic's aggregated for iSCSI access
- 1 Nic for client PC access to SMB/NFS/AFP shares
Some questions I have come up with though:
- Does that hardware sound reasonable?
- I dont know a lot about ZFS, so I was looking for advice on suggested arrau setup there.
- Would I be better with one ZFS array of 6 2TB disks, and then use pools to segregate out the data and provide snapshots etc from there?
- Do you think performance will be reasonable using that setup?
- I've had a little trouble with AD setup already with users not apearing yet (although commands like wbinfo -p and -t seem to suggest it is working) Any suggested links there?
- Some concerns around weather ZFS is ready yet, it seems as though now it is with v8 of FreeNAS (with the updates from FreeBSD underneath)
- I've read that SMB/CIFS performance isn't great on FreeBSD, is that a significant issue? or is it a small difference to linux.
So I expect to use:
- NFS shares (for server data shares)
- SMB shares (for windows pc's data and backups)
- AD for user management (already setup, just hooking up the NAS/Filer too it)
- possibly iSCSI for VM's to reside on
- AFP (I have 2 mac's as well) and I dont believe OpenFiler supports this.
- The main reason for trying FreeNAS as well as it all runs at home, so I'd like to be able to use some of the multimedia features once they come back into v8 in the future
I have an old 1366pin i7 Asus based machine with 7 SATA ports I intend to use for the task (one day I might upgrade/downgrade it to an Ivy/Sandy bridge based i3 system)
My intention with was to:
- Run FreeNAS of a USB drive
- 8GB Ram already in the existing machine
- 4 * 2TB Green drives in a ZFS Array (sorry I might not have the terminology quite right here).
- 1 * 1TB or 2TB ZFS mirrored drives for iSCSI area or VM machine backup
- 2 Nic's aggregated for iSCSI access
- 1 Nic for client PC access to SMB/NFS/AFP shares
Some questions I have come up with though:
- Does that hardware sound reasonable?
- I dont know a lot about ZFS, so I was looking for advice on suggested arrau setup there.
- Would I be better with one ZFS array of 6 2TB disks, and then use pools to segregate out the data and provide snapshots etc from there?
- Do you think performance will be reasonable using that setup?
- I've had a little trouble with AD setup already with users not apearing yet (although commands like wbinfo -p and -t seem to suggest it is working) Any suggested links there?
- Some concerns around weather ZFS is ready yet, it seems as though now it is with v8 of FreeNAS (with the updates from FreeBSD underneath)
- I've read that SMB/CIFS performance isn't great on FreeBSD, is that a significant issue? or is it a small difference to linux.