Suggestions for my 45 drives build

[incognito]

Hello everyone - it's be a long time since I've posted here, but alas I am back to ask for some of your expertise.

Here is the hardware config :

45 drives storinator dual 1200 watt PSU
3 x LSI Jbod controllers (15x8TB drives per controller)
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4
256GB DDR4 ECC RAM
2 x 256GB WD Black SSD
1 x Intel P3700 2TB PCIE NVME
2 x 1GB Intel LAN (on board)
2 x 10GB LAN (in PCIE slot)

The only purpose of this setup is to act as an iscsi target for a new vmware cluster I am building out, in it's pervious config it was using storage spaces and hyper-v

I'm not terribly concerned about overall storage capacity, there is a lot to work with here... performance wtih various VMs is my main goal.

Any suggestions for optimal config would be highly appreciated.

 

[Chris Moore]

2 x 256GB WD Black S

At work, I manage one of the 60 bay XL units and I am sure that These were the boot drives. You can still use them for that in FreeNAS, but those SATA SSDs aren't fast enough to be used for the SLOG.

1 x Intel P3700 2TB PCIE NVME

That is massive Overkill for a SLOG device, but it would be fast enough.

You want to configure the pool as mirror vdevs because that provides the largest vdev count and more vdevs generally equates to more IOPS.

 

[incognito]

At work, I manage one of the 60 bay XL units and I am sure that These were the boot drives. You can still use them for that in FreeNAS, but those SATA SSDs aren't fast enough to be used for the SLOG.

That is massive Overkill for a SLOG device, but it would be fast enough.

You want to configure the pool as mirror vdevs because that provides the largest vdev count and more vdevs generally equates to more IOPS.

Thanks for the response. What about l2arc ... any point in using the p3700 for that?

 

[Chris Moore]

If it is iSCSI there is limited utility in L2ARC. It might be useful if you want to use NFS for the data store. NFS can benefit more from L2SRC, but it would still need SLOG for acceleration of sync write.

 

[incognito]

Understood.

Once I have the pool created is there recommend a method of testing the local performance of the pool?

 

[incognito]

I guess this is where I get puzzled. I'm not sure how to properly create this pool.

 

[Chris Moore]

Understood.

Once I have the pool created is there recommend a method of testing the local performance of the pool?

You should explore the resources in my "Useful Links" as I think they would provide you with many of your answers.