Jkuz
Cadet
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2014
- Messages
- 6
Hello all! I am thoroughly a newbie at this so please forgive me if I make a really stupid mistake. I am looking to put together a FreeNAS build for my company and would love to help and guidance.
Backstory: I joined a small development company and 2 months in the IT Admin decided to up and leave the company. Before he left us, he blessed us with 2 QNAP NAS boxes which he moved all of storage from our server’s internal drives to these NAS boxes. The QNAP boxes each are 4 bays and the one is running all the servers and the other box is a replication of the first box. We have 17 VMs running over 4 physical servers and the datastores are all on this one NAS box with 4 7200 RPM SATA drives going over a 1Gbps connection. (See NASCrap.jpg for a visual representation.) I don’t know if you guessed it but the whole system is HORRIFICLY SLOW! An octogenarian snail moves quicker than our servers now. As well, it’s not terribly secure since we can only really have one drive die for each server at a time. We do have a backup system set up that gets copied to an external drive but overall the system is slow and unsafe.
So since I have the most IT experience at the company, (I worked in the IT department at my university where I just graduated from) I got “promoted” to IT admin. Now, I am trying to fix all this crap we have going on here.
Just before the previous guy left he installed a Dell PowerEdge R320 and retired a Dell PowerEdge 2900. Trying to figure out how to speed everything up I started investigating FreeNAS. I want to put FreeNAS on the 2900. Just to make sure I’m clear. FreeNAS would be installed on the bare metal and not as a VM. I would be setting up the system to share the volumes with other ESXi hosts to run the VMs on.
Here is my planned configuration:
My thought is to have 2 very small SSDs installed and have one act as the ZIL and one act as the L2ARC. Then I will have 8 bays with 500GB 7.2k SATA HDDs. I would like some input on whether I should run RAIDZ3 or RAID1+0. I have found online that RAIDZ3 is not necessary for small drives like our 500GB but the allowance for 3 drives to fail is appealing. We are using Oracle as a development DB which does have more small reads and writes than the average media server or personal use server. I would like to put more RAM into the machine but that is currently still being decided. Would this setup really suffer with only 16GB?
I have read CyberJock’s powerpoint and studied the section about ZIL and L2ARC. Because we are hosting multiple VMs through ESXi I am assuming that we will want/need both a ZIL and a L2ARC device. Maybe someone can fill me in about that more?
Overall, is this a good setup?
Again sorry if I am asking dumb questions, I read through a bunch of posts and such before posting.
Backstory: I joined a small development company and 2 months in the IT Admin decided to up and leave the company. Before he left us, he blessed us with 2 QNAP NAS boxes which he moved all of storage from our server’s internal drives to these NAS boxes. The QNAP boxes each are 4 bays and the one is running all the servers and the other box is a replication of the first box. We have 17 VMs running over 4 physical servers and the datastores are all on this one NAS box with 4 7200 RPM SATA drives going over a 1Gbps connection. (See NASCrap.jpg for a visual representation.) I don’t know if you guessed it but the whole system is HORRIFICLY SLOW! An octogenarian snail moves quicker than our servers now. As well, it’s not terribly secure since we can only really have one drive die for each server at a time. We do have a backup system set up that gets copied to an external drive but overall the system is slow and unsafe.
So since I have the most IT experience at the company, (I worked in the IT department at my university where I just graduated from) I got “promoted” to IT admin. Now, I am trying to fix all this crap we have going on here.
Just before the previous guy left he installed a Dell PowerEdge R320 and retired a Dell PowerEdge 2900. Trying to figure out how to speed everything up I started investigating FreeNAS. I want to put FreeNAS on the 2900. Just to make sure I’m clear. FreeNAS would be installed on the bare metal and not as a VM. I would be setting up the system to share the volumes with other ESXi hosts to run the VMs on.
Here is my planned configuration:
- Dell PowerEdge 2900
- CPU: 2 Intel Xeon 5000x
- RAM: 16GB DDR2 Kingston Dual Channel ECC (KTD-WS667/4G)
- NIC: Two Broadcom NetXtreme II 5708 Gigabit
- OS: USB FreeNAS install
- Storage: 10 SATA Bays
My thought is to have 2 very small SSDs installed and have one act as the ZIL and one act as the L2ARC. Then I will have 8 bays with 500GB 7.2k SATA HDDs. I would like some input on whether I should run RAIDZ3 or RAID1+0. I have found online that RAIDZ3 is not necessary for small drives like our 500GB but the allowance for 3 drives to fail is appealing. We are using Oracle as a development DB which does have more small reads and writes than the average media server or personal use server. I would like to put more RAM into the machine but that is currently still being decided. Would this setup really suffer with only 16GB?
I have read CyberJock’s powerpoint and studied the section about ZIL and L2ARC. Because we are hosting multiple VMs through ESXi I am assuming that we will want/need both a ZIL and a L2ARC device. Maybe someone can fill me in about that more?
Overall, is this a good setup?
Again sorry if I am asking dumb questions, I read through a bunch of posts and such before posting.