Switching from OpenIndiana w/ napp-it to Freenas

[eztech]

I have a few questions regarding ZFS v28 pool importing from OpenIndiana to Freenas. I have been using this setup for almost 8 months and it seems very stable however setting up share security in OpenIndiana is a bit more involved than I'd like. My setup uses an Intel serverboard w/ a Quad Core Xeon processor running ESXI 5. I use an LSI SAS9220-8i with IT firmware for JBOD setup configured for direct passthrough to OpenIndiana. I currently have 1x 120GB Kingston HyperX SSD connected to onboard SATA that ESXI and OpenIndiana load from and I have 5x 2TB drives configured as a RAIDZ-2 connected to the LSI controller.

1. Will the RAIDZ-2 pool import go smoothly?

2. Does Freenas have any issues running as a VM from an SSD?

3. How much dedicated server resources are recommended to run this setup?

4. Will SMB share security be easily configured using AD in Win2008 R2 and Freenas?

Thank You in advance for any insight as Freenas seems much more easily managed than OpenIndiana

 

[jgreco]

http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...un-FreeNAS-in-production-as-a-Virtual-Machine!

That warning having been given:

1) Haven't done it but don't see why not.

2) FreeNAS expects to be running off USB but can run off pretty much any bootable FreeBSD disk storage. Some of us have found USB to have some downsides. I like the flexibility of booting it off an ESXi datastore, which gives me RAID1 and easy upgrades.

3) As much as you can afford (and do pay attention to what it says). FreeNAS with ZFS is really designed to run on bare metal and may be a little more resource-hungry. If lower performance is acceptable, the recommendations can be bent a bit.

4) No idea.

 

[William Grzybowski]

1) I've heard OpenIndiana had a newer ZFS version, so you better make sure it is V28, if so there should be no problem

2) FreeBSD is not the best OS in the world to run as a guest OS, it is better in 9.1 and will be better in 10.x, but there is not reason why it shouldn't work, but it depends on your performance requirements.

3) The more the better, specially RAM, CPU usage is not _much_ intensive.

4) We know of several setups working with AD and Win 2008, but setup configs varies so much so you should just give it a try and open a ticket in case something doesn't work.

 

[jgreco]

2) FreeBSD is not the best OS in the world to run as a guest OS, it is better in 9.1 and will be better in 10.x, but there is not reason why it shouldn't work, but it depends on your performance requirements.

That's a curious statement to make. Virtualization typically involves some modest performance penalty, but we've virtualized FreeBSD since 4.x reasonably successfully. 8 has been very successful in that department. Is there something specific you are referring to?

 

[William Grzybowski]

It is mostly about the interrupts handling, events and such. FreeBSD <=8 uses ticks for most events, and some cases in virtualization it is not precise. In FreeBSD >=9 it started to change with the kernel starting to be tickless, in FreeBSD 10 we have calloutng for the wheel that is 100% tickless.

 

[jgreco]

Okay, yes, good points. We've actually found virtualization "fixed" a lot of problems that used to exist on physical servers, and as time has marched on, needing to deal with things like TDM E1/T1 cards, CCTV encoder cards, and all the other odd stuff that used to be hooked up to the slots of a server are now hooked up to the network instead, and even a lot of the oddball stuff is going all-network. Makes life easier. I haven't paid too much attention to the FreeBSD 9 and 10 development details, but interesting to know.