Preparing for using freeNas

[mst]

Hello experts,

I have inherited Supermicro 6047R with 24 3TB SATA hard drives. Now we have openfiler with iscsi for ESX set up. There is build in LSI 2108 raid controller and is set up in raid 60. Unfortunately, recently I have some data corruption and recovering all to external hard drive. Once this is done, I plan to reconfigure the whole server and plan to use freeNas. My concern is what raid controller should I use with freeNas that supports hardware raid and supports 24 hard drives. Plan to use raid 60 with 22 hard drives and 2 hot spares. Additionally, 2 x 10GB nic is installed so I can keep that as well. The server has 16GB or ram of which I believe is not enough for using 50TB storage in raid 60. I would like to use it for ESX as iscsi and maybe windows share.

Any advice appreciate it. Thank You

 

[cyberjock]

Whoa.. stop right there bud. If you are wanting hardware RAID then you aren't going to use FreeNAS. FreeNAS and hardware RAID are mutually exclusive. PERIOD.

If you want to use ZFS that's one thing, but mixing ZFS + hardware RAID will only make you VERY unhappy in the future. Please consult our manual, forum stickies, and my noobie guide for these kinds of mistakes that you may not be aware of but can be severe in their consequences.

16GB of RAM is quite a bit short for 50TB. You'd really want to go to 32GB minimum, with 48GB of RAM even better. ESXi to FreeNAS requires the FreeNAS box to be beefed up considerably to allow ZFS to efficiently handle your VMs.

You definitely are jumping into the pool with both feet if your first FreeNAS box is also going to be a VM datastore for ESXi.

 

[mst]

Thank You, I have now Openfiller which is ancient with no support, and from time to time I have to just reboot all storage. This storage will be as backup to my main DELL SAS HBA. I have now 32GB of ram and will look definitely for Your guide to have jump start with FreeNas. Thank You so much for advice.