Several Questions (newbie)

[blackjackz]

Hello everyone, I'm somewhat new to freenas, many years ago I used it when floppy's were around :) but its seems that freenas has come along way since then.

I have a ton of questions and wasn't quite sure where to post since this covers many different topics.

For quite some time I wanted to be able to manage back-ups at home and at my parents house (since they do not do a very good job of backups.) So I've been trying to come with a decent solution that is cost effective. What I came up was to build 2 pfsense firewalls connect them via Ipsec tunnel (dynamic IP's). Then I would have 2 separate freenas servers, one in each location that would either sync or trade back ups. Which freenas seems very capable in doing all of this so far. I get a little lost to which plugins would be best for backing up then syncing the backups between servers. Also, one last bit of information. While I'm working on setting all of this up I will also be building a VM server with Xenserver, which brings a few more questions along :)

Server Build out
case - Cooler Master HAF Stacker 935 (Freenas in small upper case, VM server bottom case)
mobo - Asrock Server motherboard C2550D4i mem - Kingston memory 2x8gb ECC
HDD - 5x 2TB WD Red NAS drives (not set in stone) ZFS RaidZ2
Plugins to be ran - backups, couch potato, sickbeard, sabnzbd, headphones, owncloud?, plex?

VM server - haven't chose parts yet

pfsense will be running on this little guy with 4gig DDR3 and standard 2.5 HDD- http://www.mitxpc.com/proddetail.asp?prod=EKIAD2500DL

Questions:
1. From what I've read the ASrock mobo shouldnt have any issues running all those applications, it may be a little taxing at times depending which back ups are scheduled. Has anyone had any experience with running sabnzbd it can be tough when extracting files or repairing?

2. Back ups are my biggest concern, which is the best way to go about it? Ideally I would back up local PC's using crashplan? or rsync? then from there to sync each freenas server? what is ideally the best way to do so?

3. I dont have a ton of exp with owncloud yet, im' still working with it. Would it be better to run a VM of it and attach network shares from Freenas or just run the plugin within the jail since i'm running a fair amount of plugins already on the Freenas Server? (from reading around it seems that there are some issues with owncloud)

4. I'm just curious too if anyone else has done something similar and what they're experience has been?

Thanks for everyone's time I know its a lengthy post

 

[anodos]

You should use 6 drives for raidz2. In this case you will get ~8TB usable storage. If your case / mobo doesn't support 6 drives, go with 4 drives in RAID10 (if you bump up the drives to 3TB then you will still have the ~6TB usable storage in your original configuration). Rebuilding a mirror is much faster than raidz2.

I would get a supermicro motherboard and stick to the HCL for RAM. I also like supermicro cases. The fans tend to be loud but the cooling is very good and having hot-swap bays is nice.

What are you wanting to run in VMs?

On my Windows workstation I use Microsoft's SyncToy to copy my current work to a CIFS share on a FreeNAS server. It's simple and works for me, but doesn't have lots of bells and whistles.

In your situation I may give some thought to going xeon and vanilla FreeBSD to handle all the file sharing, VMs, etc from a single machine.

 

[solarisguy]

6x 2TB drives in RAID-Z2 gives you only around 6TiB useable, since you have to convert between capacity in TB (decimal) and TiB (power of two), and one should not plan on using more than 80% of ZFS pool capacity, so...

• 2 TB = 1.819 TiB
• 80% * 4 * 1.819 TiB = 5.8208 TiB

 

[blackjackz]

almost 6TB should be plenty of storage for me for quite some time.

VM server is for my own enjoyment really, i like testing and tinkering and it will be kind of my home lab.

If thats the case would it make more sense to go the zfsguru or nexenta route for the storage and set up a few VM's with zfsguru or nexenta attached storage? I want the storage handling to be separate from the VM server.

VM's would run backups, couch potato, sickbeard, sabnzbd, headphones, owncloud, plex

 

[solarisguy]

The rule of calculating storage is identical for any RAID-Z2 or RAID 6 implementation, regardless of an operating system.

More storage, than your initial needs estimate, would allow you to have ZFS snapshots. Unless 6 TiB already included space for snapshots.

80% rule is an advice for ZFS. Other filesystems might use 90%. Ultimately, it really depends on how the filesystem is being used. 80% is safe for everybody. If you have read-only static data, then probably going past 90% is fine. To avoid religious wars about Unix filesystems, you might recall that defragmenting under Windows with less than 10% free space was very different than the same process at 20% of free space...

Some of the functionality you listed is available via jails/plugins straight in FreeNAS, see
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Plugins

I would prefer to have separate hardware for FreeNAS and Citrix XenServer, not even the same enclosure.

 

[Nick2253]

Since I'm basically exactly in your shoes, I'll tell you how I handled everything:

Storage: I'm using a dedicated stand-alone FreeNAS box. I've got an ASRock mobo, and it works a treat. I would recommend something slightly different then you chose for FreeNAS, because, if you are using Windows, your single-thread speed is going to matter more than your total processing throughput.

Backup: I'm connecting my local network with my remote network using dual pfSense boxes. I'm doing backup locally using Acronis, and then I replicate using rsync to my remote site (just a bunch of external hard drives, not FreeNAS)

VM: I purchased an old(ish) server off of eBay. You can get a great deal on used server equipment. Just don't get something rack mounted, because the noise is terrible. Make sure you get a processor that is x64, VT-x, and VT-d. The E55XX family seems to be about the sweet spot right now on eBay. I too use XenServer for my VM environment (and I love it!). I was able to find an older server for about $200 w/ 6GB of memory without HDDs (shipped). I had a spare SSD, so I installed XenServer on the SSD and then use FreeNAS for the rest of the VM storage. I've currently got a ye olde Windows 98 machine running (old software for my car that I can't find a replacement for), CentOS LDAP server, and CentOS database server for XBMC.

 

[blackjackz]

Excellent information nick! I see what your saying about the processing throughput, that was also a concern with such a weak processor. I may just go with the crashplan setup on each PC, backing up to Freenas Server. Then use rsync to replicate to the other Freenas box.

From the other post I will prob be going with 4TB x 6 drives for storage.

Yea I hear great things about Xenserver, i cant wait to have my VM server built!

Was it challenging to set up 2 pfsense boxes to talk to each other over dynamic IP?

 

[Nick2253]

No. I used No-ip to get a dynamic DNS. pfSense is actually capable of communicating with a number of dynamic DNS providers and updating the DNS if your IP(s) change.