Hello all! First post but long LONG time user of the project (before NAS4Free fork).
Sorry if this is a duplicate somewhere... I couldn't find anyone asking about the VM stability and best practices.
I absolutely love FreeNAS and I have come to rely upon it for my business. In fact it's such a great product I have suggested it overwhelmingly over any other product available both for the abilities of the platform and for ZFS stability. Hardware in-proprietary compatibility is awesome with FreeNAS and we live in the boonies, so getting replacement parts is difficult.
Since 9.10, I've been tempted to play with the VM features WITHIN FreeNAS but have chosen to not utilize them for any of my clients. I ran a basic Windows 10 box inside my box for testing and it works awesome. But now I have an actual use case in production that the VM functions would work great for (so I think). I'm looking for opinion as well as suggestion based on the info provided below.
The office is a Dental office. They currently run XRAYs to a freenas box over iSCSI from their single Windows server. The Freenas also runs backups of the server and the patient data base, all of which is encrypted. They have an additional office which the Freenas syncs to off site over a VPN tunnel. The server is dying and we are looking to move to Server 2019 anyway as 2008 support ends January. ZFS snapshots are a must since ransomware is a huge concern and it means major downtime if infected otherwise, so FreeNAS is my go to choice for both data and VM support.
My Questions are:
Would you trust a VM Windows Server 2019 within the Freenas environment? If not, why and what would you recommend (ProxMox, XENserver)?
What topology would be best for this? Freenas is currently on domain and has an AD user. Virtualized, would this cause issues?
Would it be better to install Windows Server and then VM Freenas (I hate this idea, but have to ask)?
The Goal:
Get down to only two boxes, eliminating 2 others and making it so updates can be done off hours (currently has a login for encryption at boot for Win Server).
Use processor power and storage better to eliminate network bottlenecks as best as we can from workstation to server relationship.
Have backups and security using Snapshots as well as backing up to our old FreeNAS and then Sync offsite to sister office FreeNAS.
Hardware specs for new server:
Dell T440, single processor 8 core, 32gb DDR4 ECC, the 710 card it comes flashed to IT mode
10gb Chesio card to Cisco switch for Data/VM
1gb link for board managment
2x Intel SSD drives with PLP (not sure on model yet) for ZIL (Mirror)
4x 4TB Enterprise 7200k drives in ZFS Raid2 (8TB is Plenty of space for XRAYs and Patient data).
Use old FreeNAS as backup for the server (Lenovo T140s)
I want to hit this out of the park and plan on doing both dental offices over the summer. Any advice is much appreciated.
Ryan
Sorry if this is a duplicate somewhere... I couldn't find anyone asking about the VM stability and best practices.
I absolutely love FreeNAS and I have come to rely upon it for my business. In fact it's such a great product I have suggested it overwhelmingly over any other product available both for the abilities of the platform and for ZFS stability. Hardware in-proprietary compatibility is awesome with FreeNAS and we live in the boonies, so getting replacement parts is difficult.
Since 9.10, I've been tempted to play with the VM features WITHIN FreeNAS but have chosen to not utilize them for any of my clients. I ran a basic Windows 10 box inside my box for testing and it works awesome. But now I have an actual use case in production that the VM functions would work great for (so I think). I'm looking for opinion as well as suggestion based on the info provided below.
The office is a Dental office. They currently run XRAYs to a freenas box over iSCSI from their single Windows server. The Freenas also runs backups of the server and the patient data base, all of which is encrypted. They have an additional office which the Freenas syncs to off site over a VPN tunnel. The server is dying and we are looking to move to Server 2019 anyway as 2008 support ends January. ZFS snapshots are a must since ransomware is a huge concern and it means major downtime if infected otherwise, so FreeNAS is my go to choice for both data and VM support.
My Questions are:
Would you trust a VM Windows Server 2019 within the Freenas environment? If not, why and what would you recommend (ProxMox, XENserver)?
What topology would be best for this? Freenas is currently on domain and has an AD user. Virtualized, would this cause issues?
Would it be better to install Windows Server and then VM Freenas (I hate this idea, but have to ask)?
The Goal:
Get down to only two boxes, eliminating 2 others and making it so updates can be done off hours (currently has a login for encryption at boot for Win Server).
Use processor power and storage better to eliminate network bottlenecks as best as we can from workstation to server relationship.
Have backups and security using Snapshots as well as backing up to our old FreeNAS and then Sync offsite to sister office FreeNAS.
Hardware specs for new server:
Dell T440, single processor 8 core, 32gb DDR4 ECC, the 710 card it comes flashed to IT mode
10gb Chesio card to Cisco switch for Data/VM
1gb link for board managment
2x Intel SSD drives with PLP (not sure on model yet) for ZIL (Mirror)
4x 4TB Enterprise 7200k drives in ZFS Raid2 (8TB is Plenty of space for XRAYs and Patient data).
Use old FreeNAS as backup for the server (Lenovo T140s)
I want to hit this out of the park and plan on doing both dental offices over the summer. Any advice is much appreciated.
Ryan
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