Old enterprise gear build

[Donny Davis]

I have been tinkering around for several months trying to come up with a build that meets my requirements, and exceeds my expectations.

So this is what I have so far.

HP DL380 G6 with 16x sas bays
2x lsi 9211 internal HBA'S in IT mode
1x lsi 9200-8e external HBA in IT mode ( all cards on v16 of the lsi firmware)
1x Chelsio s320 10gb SFP+ Nic
2x HP MSA 70 - 25 bays each
2x 120gb Crucial Drives
64x 600gb dual port 10k SAS Drives

I am trying to get maximum performance and of course no waste space (ie raid 10).

I was going to use the ssd's for zil and put the drives in raidz2 8x8


Any suggestions? Thoughts?

 

[BigDave]

I am trying to get maximum performance and of course no waste space (ie raid 10).

I was going to use the ssd's for zil and put the drives in raidz2 8x8

RAIDz2 is great for parity, not so good for performance (akin to RAID6).

I'm really guessing here, but you may benefit from these stickies in our forum:

• The ZFS Primer

• Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, Zil and L2ARC

 

[Donny Davis]

I'm thinking performance should still be pretty good. I'm striping across 8 array's.

I should edit my post to say maximum performance without wasting space. If the disks were priced better per gig then I would go raid 10 all the way, and it would be a champion.

I did read the zfs primer, and the zil,slog etc slideshow.

This is used as a oVirt backstore on either iscsi or NFS... Not sure which I am going to do yet.

NFS is way easier to manage as far as backups go.

If I had anymore money I would get one of those killer pcie ssd's for my zil and slog. The 120g drives are way overkill on size for zil or slog, and they aren't that great on performance. I wish someone made an affordable pcie ssd with say only 16gb for zfs purposes.

I'm out of funds for the moment, so what I have will have to do.

I was really trying to build a platform that isn't crazy loud (yea you supermicro) and could scale a little bit if I need to.

I can add on another lsi 9200 and a couple more msa70's if I need more space. I should be able to scale up to about 75tb.

I could have got more space for my money if I had gone sata instead of sas, but sas drives perform good and everything is compatible for once. I remember reading a post by cyberjock about not using sata drives on a sas hba, and port.

Thanks for the reply and its nice to meet you

Donny D

 

[BigDave]

You're welcome Donny and it's nice to meet you too.

2x lsi 9211 internal HBA'S in IT mode

Are you aware of the version 9.3.1 move to the P20 driver? If you plan to use that version of FreeNAS,
you'll need to flash the firmware on all your LSI controllers.

 

[Donny Davis]

Funny that you say that, because that was where I started, and I get a red alert that it should be on p16. There is risk in flashing these cards, so what would I gain by making the move to p20.


Thanks

Donny D

 

[BigDave]

P20 firmware is needed to match the new version's (9.3.1) driver which was on P16 for a long while
but has now been updated. There is a huge thread regarding this as "the bomb" was kinda dropped on us without warning.
Your alert was more than likely given if you have updated FreeNAS to 9.3.1 (with the p20 driver) and your cards are still P16 FW.

 

[BigDave]

There is risk in flashing these cards, so what would I gain by making the move to p20.

Nothing to gain really (my performance is the same), but there is a great danger if the FW and driver does not match.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...t-match-driver-version-20-for-dev-mps0.36536/

 

[Donny Davis]

I can update them, but like I said in the post above, I originally had them on p20 and when I got to the ui I was excited to create my pool and share, just to find out that there was an alert telling me that I needed to be on p16.

I will check to see if I am on the latest version of freeNAS, I downloaded the ISO a while ago.

Thanks for keeping me in the loop.

Donny D

 

[Donny Davis]

Yep.. I have an update.... I'm surely glad you said something to me before I got any data on this setup.

Big Thanks Big Dave


Donny D

 

[BigDave]

Glad I could help. ;)