Hello!
I am in the process of building a new storage solution for my data. Up to now I've been using FreeNAS as a mere iSCSI initiator host to a central Windows server, and the Windows server has accessed the drives directly, handled deduplication and whatnot.
I must admit I am pretty fresh when it comes to vdevs, pools, RAIDz and all that but I've been looking at alternative storage solutions (QNAP, Synology, Windows Storage Spaces, Unraid etc) and I think FreeNAS has the best solution for me as it's cheap to setup, flexible in its configuration, lots of room for feature expansion etc.
To make things easier and more efficient I've thought about setting up FreeNAS initially with 6x 10TB drives in a pool, configured with RAIDz2 (2 drives parity, 4 drives data). Up to now I've used only individual drives, connected to my Windows server and Windows has handled encryption and deduplication on each drive, but with this solution Windows would be presented with a larger volume and it would be easier to manage, and on top of that I'll get some redundancy. I will still do backup to a separate file server that will be configured the same way. And it's easy to expand the volume as well by creating an additional RAIDz2 vdev and pool it with the first (or keep it separate presenting a second drive to Windows).
My question is however... if Windows is going to handle deduplication, should ZFS compression be enabled? Wouldn't that just waste a lot of CPU cycles trying to compress data that is deduplicated?
And are there any recommendations against my RAIDz2+iSCSI solution? The fileserver is directly connected to the Windows server by a 10Gbit connection so it doesn't need to be shared with other hosts, and since I will let Windows handle dedup I need to use iSCSI. I've considered other means like NFS etc but it just presents too much issues from the Windows side with permissions, services etc, and it works better when Windows thinks it's locally connected storage. I will be running ReFS (which also handles block level checksumming etc like ZFS does) but that overhead won't be massive anyway. And I don't think running RAID on Windows itself is a good idea since it's extremely slow if a rebuild would be needed...
Thanks!
I am in the process of building a new storage solution for my data. Up to now I've been using FreeNAS as a mere iSCSI initiator host to a central Windows server, and the Windows server has accessed the drives directly, handled deduplication and whatnot.
I must admit I am pretty fresh when it comes to vdevs, pools, RAIDz and all that but I've been looking at alternative storage solutions (QNAP, Synology, Windows Storage Spaces, Unraid etc) and I think FreeNAS has the best solution for me as it's cheap to setup, flexible in its configuration, lots of room for feature expansion etc.
To make things easier and more efficient I've thought about setting up FreeNAS initially with 6x 10TB drives in a pool, configured with RAIDz2 (2 drives parity, 4 drives data). Up to now I've used only individual drives, connected to my Windows server and Windows has handled encryption and deduplication on each drive, but with this solution Windows would be presented with a larger volume and it would be easier to manage, and on top of that I'll get some redundancy. I will still do backup to a separate file server that will be configured the same way. And it's easy to expand the volume as well by creating an additional RAIDz2 vdev and pool it with the first (or keep it separate presenting a second drive to Windows).
My question is however... if Windows is going to handle deduplication, should ZFS compression be enabled? Wouldn't that just waste a lot of CPU cycles trying to compress data that is deduplicated?
And are there any recommendations against my RAIDz2+iSCSI solution? The fileserver is directly connected to the Windows server by a 10Gbit connection so it doesn't need to be shared with other hosts, and since I will let Windows handle dedup I need to use iSCSI. I've considered other means like NFS etc but it just presents too much issues from the Windows side with permissions, services etc, and it works better when Windows thinks it's locally connected storage. I will be running ReFS (which also handles block level checksumming etc like ZFS does) but that overhead won't be massive anyway. And I don't think running RAID on Windows itself is a good idea since it's extremely slow if a rebuild would be needed...
Thanks!