One FreeNAS for Storage, one for replication

[Jamberry]

Dear FreeNAS users. Following up my old post (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/first-freenas-build-storage-only.54175/#post-375312) the situation and strategy changed a little bit.

I got to a point where can't see the wood for the trees. That's why I want to propose my build to you.
Maybe I have overlooked something and I don't have the money to buy twice.
So here we go:

There are two houses "A" and "B".
On house A I wanna build a FreeNAS Server. Already got a rack case with 15bays, 32GB ECC RAM, 9x 2TB 2x 8TB and a Supermicro x11 board.
I will use the FreeNAS Server "A" for the following

- Make TimeMachine backups (on the road with OpenVPN)
- Save my movie library
- iSCSI for backing up 4 Windows Server and other virtual machines. I need iSCSI because Windows Server Backup allows can't do incremental backups to network shares.

Server "B" is on a different location. It is only used to backup server „A“.

My questions:

What storage configuration would you recommend? I already have 9x 2TB WD greens (will flash intellipark) and two
8TB Seagate Archive. I have read that you should not go above 50% for iSCSI storage but could not figure out if this applies to the pool or the virtual hard disk or the vdev.
I think i will use 8 WDs in mirror for the iSCSI target and the two 8TB in a separate mirror for media. Or would you create a pool across all harddisks? Because the 2tb HDDs are old, I will use the 9th one as a hot spare. I know that RAIDZ2 would provide better redundancy (and worse resilver) but I like the easy upgradability. And if really two drives fail, I would still have a backup on house B.

House B will use RAIDZ1. Since I will make Snapshots on A, I don’t think I need better redundancy than that. Is it a good idea to shutdown Freenas on house B and only start once a day for backup? Or is FreeNAS not really made for this and will corrupt the usb stick quickly, mess up scrub and so on?

Cheers!

 

[joeschmuck]

Well that is true, iSCSI should be no more that 50% full as a rulea nd this is for the pool it resides on.

The way you create your pool is entirely up to you but I don't see a need for all the mirrors if you are only using this for backups and storing your movies, unless I mis-understood and maybe you are running your VMs off of the iSCSI?

If this isn't for running VMs from, how about something a little different... Why not create a normal RAIDZ2 with your drives and use some other program to create incremental backups? I know there are some free programs but I prefer Acronis which is a pay program but it's cheap if you get it on sale, about $30 or sometimes less. The 4th of July sale is coming, great time to look for deals.

As for House "B", depending on the size of the drives and the drive count should dictate if you use RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2. If you are storing 10TB of data, how long do you think it would take to restore all that data over the internet? Could be a while.

Just a thought.

Good luck,
-Joe

 

[Jamberry]

Well that is true, iSCSI should be no more that 50% full as a rulea nd this is for the pool it resides on.

The way you create your pool is entirely up to you but I don't see a need for all the mirrors if you are only using this for backups and storing your movies, unless I mis-understood and maybe you are running your VMs off of the iSCSI?

If this isn't for running VMs from, how about something a little different... Why not create a normal RAIDZ2 with your drives and use some other program to create incremental backups? I know there are some free programs but I prefer Acronis which is a pay program but it's cheap if you get it on sale, about $30 or sometimes less. The 4th of July sale is coming, great time to look for deals.

As for House "B", depending on the size of the drives and the drive count should dictate if you use RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2. If you are storing 10TB of data, how long do you think it would take to restore all that data over the internet? Could be a while.

Just a thought.

Good luck,
-Joe

I want to use mirrors for easy upgradeability and a little bit of performance (600mbit read speeds).
I have found a solution for my backups. I will just mount some virtual disk on the network so i won't need iSCSI. House A and B is a 15min drive away, and by the end of 2017 both will have gigabit fiber. Thank you for advice and have a nice Sunday!

 

[joeschmuck]

and by the end of 2017 both will have gigabit fiber.

I'm jealous, I need to move to get that kind of connection.