Small Business FreeNAS Build, Ideas, Advice, Recommendations all welcomed.

[Zredwire]

I am gonna start with an existing pc just to "play" and learn some basic stuff and how FN works, before proceeding on buying/building a purpose machine.

I am also new to FreeNAS and this is exactly what I did. I took a test PC and ran FreeNAS on it for two months while learning about the system. After running in test I had a much better understanding of what hardware I needed (though I started to purchase items after a couple of weeks and ended up with a production system that has little room for expansion as my needs changed as I learned more about the system). FreeNAS can do so many things that you don't know what you don't know until you try it out. Snapshots are one example. Anyway I only use my system for storage and do not run any programs on it. I learned FreeNAS in this order:

vdevs
Pool (or Volume) - I think they are the same thing, someone can correct me if not.
Dataset and Zvol
Sharing
Serices (services that affect sharing)

Permissions

Boot Disk

Snapshots
Scrubs
S.M.A.R.T task

Email notifications

Networking and LAG

Config Backups

SLOG and L2ARC

I am sure I am missing something but you get the idea. Don't have to learn it all at once. Once you get a share going it is usable (for testing). Even things like network can wait as you set up basic networking when installing. Advanced things can wait until you have time. At first Youtube videos really helped me get started. After that the guides in the forum, the manual, and various blogs found from google searches helped me understand some of the advanced stuff (I still have a lot to learn). Anyway you could really learn all this in a few days if you have the time. I spread it over a couple of months as I don't have a lot of time per day to devote to it. Either way I would really encourage you to learn FreeNAS well if you are going to use it at your business. If you don't want to learn it an all in one NAS package may be better (though any product will have some learning curve).

 

[garm]

vdev’s are not the same as pools/volumes..

ZFS builds its pools from one or more vdev(s). These consist of one or more harddrive. Datasets can then be created in a pool and behaves as you would expect a file system would, with the exception that it’s size isn’t defined

 

[garm]

because the files i am gonna be storing need to be shared simultaneously and the size of them won't be that big, i am thinking of having one big pool that stores all of the data.

Most windows programs don’t respond well to working on files being simultaneously edited. And the pool layout has nothing to do with the shares you set up.

Due to the kind of business, i don't see storage needs going up anytime soon. The only case where i would like to have more pools and generally save data separately in different pools, would be if the number of the computers increased dramatically, which again i don't see happening any time soon.

Personally I have a hard time seeing what kind of business that doesn’t generate data. You need to keep in mind that snapshots of your data will result in disk utilization.

About my backup strategy, i was thinking of having the smallest number of HDD's, if possible having two in the office pc, mirroring one to the other and be able to swap them if anything goes wrong.

That isn’t a backup strategy I would trust in your case. Look at something that are able to either us zfs send/receive or something like Restic or Borg.

Other than that i would also configure an offsite backup to my personal Nas.

This has potential legal ramifications you should consider as well. Most likely it will have to be stored encrypted “in use”. Again look at Restic or something similar.

 

[AlexKo]

Most windows programs don’t respond well to working on files being simultaneously edited. And the pool layout has nothing to do with the shares you set up.


Personally I have a hard time seeing what kind of business that doesn’t generate data. You need to keep in mind that snapshots of your data will result in disk utilization.


That isn’t a backup strategy I would trust in your case. Look at something that are able to either us zfs send/receive or something like Restic or Borg.


This has potential legal ramifications you should consider as well. Most likely it will have to be stored encrypted “in use”. Again look at Restic or something similar.

Thank you for all the info, once i setup the system i am going to look up everything you say.

Snapshots can be scheduled to perform at a time where the server isn't used.
I can have daily snapshots of the pool, but also keep an external backup of the files in case just one file gets corrupted, or fails in any way, so that i can restore it directly. Does this sound any good ?

 

[AlexKo]

Personally, I'd go with a Supermicro motherboard, four 4TB WD Red drives as RAIDZ2, 16 or 32G of RAM, and one or two SSDs for a boot device. I might go with an X10SLL motherboard, just because of current DDR4 RAM prices. Add to this a quality power supply and a decent UPS. Processor is not critical, a Pentium or i3 is probably fine.

I know that 4TB of capacity was stated, but this should provide room to grow.

Thank you for your advice, i have one question for you.

You said that the cpu is not a big of a deal. I would like to use link aggregation for bigger bandwidth, so that i can get decent speeds across many clients at a time. I have heard that link aggregation benefits from more cores/threads, is that any true or any decent 4 core would be just as good?

Also if i can go with a xeon, would i have any advantages or the small storage won't benefit of of it?

thanks

 

[AlexKo]

Most of us use one pool. It's easier to manage the storage.

One use case for several pools, would be if you had both SSD and spinning rust in your server. Create a "fast" pool with SSD's and a "slow" one with SATA drives.

.

In my use case, i wouldn't like to separate the files in different pools, due to the nature of the files.
I would much rather benefit from a single pool with some SSDcaching (maybe one for read one for write?).

I haven't heard from anyone about SSD caching in FN, isn't it recommended ?

Hmm snapshots seem like a very good idea, would i be able to use the snapshot in case of failure, through internet? Let's say something happens and i am not near the office, could i login to my NAS at home and load the snapshot to the office server without being there?

I know i am asking too many things, but just all the capabilities of FN get me very excited!

 

[gpsguy]

I wasn't suggesting it, just giving you one example of why someone might have separate pools.

In my use case, i wouldn't like to separate the files in different pools

For your use case, don't worry about it. Adding a SSD might actually hurt performance. You're better off maxing out the RAM first.

I would much rather benefit from a single pool with some SSDcaching

Snapshots are a great idea. Choose a schedule and interval that meets your needs.

If you only take one snapshot a day, say at noon, and at 11am tomorrow, you determine you need an earlier version, is the one from today at noon, good enough. Maybe hourly snapshots beteween 8am-5pm weekdays would be better. It's up to you.

Having snapshots enabled can help you survive a ransomware attack. Just roll back to a time before it happened.

Hmm snapshots seem like a very good idea, would i be able to use the snapshot in case of failure, through internet? Let's say something happens and i am not near the office, could i login to my NAS at home and load the snapshot to the office server without being there?

For managing the server, I'd use a VPN connection to the office network. Do whatever management you need via that connection.

could i login to my NAS at home and load the snapshot to the office server without being there

 

[Stux]

Usingva quad port gigabit card with LACP won’t really work out that well.

A much better approach is to use a 10gbe Ethernet card and an Ethernet switch with at least a few 10gbe ports.

 

[AlexKo]

Usingva quad port gigabit card with LACP won’t really work out that well.

A much better approach is to use a 10gbe Ethernet card and an Ethernet switch with at least a few 10gbe ports.

Hmmm sounds a bit expensive thought, i would love to get away with just a decent gigabit NIC and switch.

 

[AlexKo]

Okey, I’ll bite..

If you intend to host Nextcloud on the machine as well your task grows exponentially. Firewall, secure network zones etc will be important. Domain and DNS management together with securing any internet facing resource will keep you up at night.

Would a dedicated PC running pfsense, give me the security level i would need, in order to secure my NAS and therefore running any cloud plugin for FN safely ?

 

[garm]

PfSense would be able to do the job if configured correctly. You need to make sure that your web server is isolated in DMZ and that it’s traffic to FreeNAS isn’t mixed with the regular LAN traffic.

 

[wblock]

You said that the cpu is not a big of a deal. I would like to use link aggregation for bigger bandwidth, so that i can get decent speeds across many clients at a time. I have heard that link aggregation benefits from more cores/threads, is that any true or any decent 4 core would be just as good?

For the small number of users, I'd try to avoid LAGG. Maybe go with a 10G network card in the NAS to a switch with a 10G uplink, then gigabit to the clients, but that also could be premature optimization. This is something that could be added later. What are the clients doing that needs this heavy bandwidth?

Also if i can go with a xeon, would i have any advantages or the small storage won't benefit of of it?

It's not the amount of storage, but the amount of processing required. FreeNAS use cases vary wildly. Some people have mostly file sharing, which is not heavily CPU-dependent (except for SMB, which is CPU-limited). Some people have NAS systems to serve video and do transcoding, which is heavily CPU-dependent. If money is not an object, a Xeon has more capacity.

 

[adrianwi]

How many users? You mention sharing excel-word documents, so I'd give some thought to using Office 365 or and forgetting about having to support a FreeNAS box. Might cost a little more over time, although will be much easier to configure and support. Maybe not that much more expensive if you'll need Office licensing anyway? Other online office suites are available ;)

 

[AlexKo]

For the small number of users, I'd try to avoid LAGG. Maybe go with a 10G network card in the NAS to a switch with a 10G uplink, then gigabit to the clients, but that also could be premature optimization. This is something that could be added later. What are the clients doing that needs this heavy bandwidth?
.

There is no big need for big bandwidth, if you consider the tasks each computer is doing. But i am a bit worried as the server will serve 10 computers every single moment, better be safe than sorry, don't you think?

 

[AlexKo]

How many users? You mention sharing excel-word documents, so I'd give some thought to using Office 365 or and forgetting about having to support a FreeNAS box. Might cost a little more over time, although will be much easier to configure and support. Maybe not that much more expensive if you'll need Office licensing anyway? Other online office suites are available ;)

Thank you for your suggestion,

well excels/words aren't the only files, and for me keeping all the office files in one place would really help the situation.

Also keeping the files all together would help me manage them more neatly, having a specific saving strategy across all the employees (hard to do that if everyone saves his work their way).

Lastly it would be sooo easy to just add a computer to the network and be able to have all the needed files right away, not to say if a computer fails you just swap the computer and plug it into the network.

Sooo yea, we really need a file server :P

 

[AlexKo]

PfSense would be able to do the job if configured correctly. You need to make sure that your web server is isolated in DMZ and that it’s traffic to FreeNAS isn’t mixed with the regular LAN traffic.

Nice,
hopefully Pfsense will be my next project , once i learn some basic FN stuff. So hyped about it!

 

[wblock]

There is no big need for big bandwidth, if you consider the tasks each computer is doing. But i am a bit worried as the server will serve 10 computers every single moment, better be safe than sorry, don't you think?

Well, depends on the goals and budget. You might end up spending money on things that are unnecessary while neglecting things that would have a real impact. Not every one of those 10 computers will be reading and writing to the NAS at the same time. And the type of work they are doing should dictate the hardware. Writing spreadsheets is far less demanding than editing huge video files, for example.

 

[gpsguy]

^^ what he said.