NetApp SAN Configuration Questions

[Nikolithebear]

Hey All,

 

I have the option to get a NetApp DS4243 with 24 450GB Drives for fairly cheap and I wanted to use it as a homelab SAN as well as a backup box.  For a controller I read that you can get a NetApp X2065A 4Port HBA for a JBOD passthrough to the server.  Im wanting to double check that Im in the right here.  

 

Edit: The OS I'd use for the server would be something like Windows Server 2016.  I'm also wanting maybe an HBA that has Raid enabled on it for something like a raid 6. However Im thinking thats really expensive. 

[Lurick]

I could be wrong but I think they need a controller as well like the FAS2240-4

 

Edit:

Storage is not my strong suit, or even close, so I'm just doing research on the unit. Also, might want to see if its FC only or if it does regular ethernet as well.

[leadeater]

Yes that should work, good that you are aware that it's purely a disk shelf with no controllers etc too.

[Nikolithebear]

Just now, Lurick said:

I could be wrong but I think they need a controller as well like the FAS2240-4

I watched a video where someone pretty much got a desktop computer, and a HBA Raid Controller, and basicly slapped it together into a raid ) on the raid card. 

 

I wanted to basicly pass through the disks to the R410 and use windows Server Storage Spaces to put it into a software raid (I would perfer hardware raid but its just for homelab stuff so learning is more of the goal.  ) 

 

 

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Yes that should work, good that you are aware that it's purely a disk shelf with no controllers etc too.

A large amount of googling was done at 2AM when I found this deal.  Its 270 bucks after shipping for it.  24 450gb drives and fulling redundant IO in the back. 

[leadeater]

Just now, Nikolithebear said:

I watched a video where someone pretty much got a desktop computer, and a HBA Raid Controller, and basicly slapped it together into a raid ) on the raid card. 

 

I wanted to basicly pass through the disks to the R410 and use windows Server Storage Spaces to put it into a software raid (I would perfer hardware raid but its just for homelab stuff so learning is more of the goal.  ) 

 

 

A large amount of googling was done at 2AM when I found this deal.  Its 270 bucks after shipping for it.  24 450gb drives and fulling redundant IO in the back. 

I'm assuming you have seen this? https://community.netapp.com/t5/FAS-and-V-Series-Storage-Systems-Discussions/repurpose-ds4243-as-DAS-jbod/td-p/131377

[Lurick]

Just now, Nikolithebear said:

-snip-

Cool, most of my sparse dealings with storage always seem to involve Fibre channel and pain, lots of pain, so just checking  

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, Nikolithebear said:

I wanted to basicly pass through the disks to the R410 and use windows Server Storage Spaces to put it into a software raid (I would perfer hardware raid but its just for homelab stuff so learning is more of the goal.  ) 

Hardware RAID or Storage Spaces will work, depends what hardware you have on hand but I'm guessing you don't have a good RAID card?

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, Lurick said:

Cool, most of my sparse dealings with storage always seem to involve Fibre channel and pain, lots of pain, so just checking  

Had to deal with converged networking yet? Ethernet and FC/IB on the same NIC and switch port, bet that's more painful heh.

[Nikolithebear]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I'm assuming you have seen this? https://community.netapp.com/t5/FAS-and-V-Series-Storage-Systems-Discussions/repurpose-ds4243-as-DAS-jbod/td-p/131377

 

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Hardware RAID or Storage Spaces will work, depends what hardware you have on hand but I'm guessing you don't have a good RAID card?

Correct!  I found a X2065A on ebay for dirt cheap so thats in the list of things to get plus 8088 cables. I dont have a nice raid card unfortuantly but I wasent sure what to really look for if I wanted hardware raid with this SAN

 

 

3 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Cool, most of my sparse dealings with storage always seem to involve Fibre channel and pain, lots of pain, so just checking  

Most of the ones I find even at work are fibre channel and I cringe at the thought of working with it. 

[Lurick]

Just now, leadeater said:

Had to deal with converged networking yet? Ethernet and FC/IB on the same NIC and switch port, bet that's more painful heh.

I have not yet poked my head into the bowels of hell and I have no plans to do so any time soon  

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, Nikolithebear said:

Correct!  I found a X2065A on ebay for dirt cheap so thats in the list of things to get plus 8088 cables. I dont have a nice raid card unfortuantly but I wasent sure what to really look for if I wanted hardware raid with this SAN

Take special note of the sector size for the Netapp disks and having to reformat and change it as noted in your video you linked.

[Nikolithebear]

Just now, leadeater said:

Take special note of the sector size for the Netapp disks and having to reformat and change it as noted in your video you linked.

I was looking at that, which dosent sounds fun.  Do I have to reformat them?  To my understanding its changing the Sector size which would just add space.  Also nicely enough that guy in the video made a  video on reformatting them as well.

 

 

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, Nikolithebear said:

I was looking at that, which dosent sounds fun.  Do I have to reformat them?  To my understanding its changing the Sector size which would just add space.  Also nicely enough that guy in the video made a  video on reformatting them as well.

It'll effect performance as well, it's also possible at least with hardware RAID that it won't be able to use the disks at all unless the sector size is changed. It's worth just trying it changing nothing first and seeing how it goes.

[Nikolithebear]

Just now, leadeater said:

It'll effect performance as well, it's also possible at least with hardware RAID that it won't be able to use the disks at all unless the sector size is changed.

Interesting, sense I'd be using software raid I'm wondering if the disks would pop up either way.  I always hope for plug and play in the server world and always get disappointing almost instantly.   If I where to do hardware raid what raid controller would I be able to use in this situation.  The machine Id most likely be using in this case for a controller would be a Dell R410. 

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, Nikolithebear said:

Interesting, sense I'd be using software raid I'm wondering if the disks would pop up either way.  I always hope for plug and play in the server world and always get disappointing almost instantly.   If I where to do hardware raid what raid controller would I be able to use in this situation.  The machine Id most likely be using in this case for a controller would be a Dell R410. 

RAID controller won't actually matter, any will do so you don't have to get a Dell one but I'd try getting one first. You're more likely to get Storage Spaces working without changing the sector sizes than hardware RAID though.

 

Server stuff generally is plug and play if your buying new and using the HCL lists etc, used is where all sorts of fun ensues lol

[Nikolithebear]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

RAID controller won't actually matter, any will do so you don't have to get a Dell one but I'd try getting one first. You're more likely to get Storage Spaces working without changing the sector sizes than hardware RAID though.

 

Server stuff generally is plug and play if your buying new and using the HCL lists etc, used is where all sorts of fun ensues lol

Looks like Ill just use storage spaces.  I'm a college student that just got done with a (luckily) paid internship so I'm kinda sitting on funds that could be (and most likely) will be put towards more homelab stuff.  I really want to move to a 42U Rack and not my 27U because its getting kinda full... My next project when this is done is moving to diskless servers and iSCI booting my other R410, R710 and R610 off my SAN maybe with either 10GB links or just some FC 4gb Nics that I can find in the trash outside of my office... 

 

Anyways, thank you and @Lurick for all the help.  I'm sure I'll be back with updates and issues soon enough.  

[leadeater]

14 minutes ago, Nikolithebear said:

Looks like Ill just use storage spaces.  I'm a college student that just got done with a (luckily) paid internship so I'm kinda sitting on funds that could be (and most likely) will be put towards more homelab stuff.  I really want to move to a 42U Rack and not my 27U because its getting kinda full... My next project when this is done is moving to diskless servers and iSCI booting my other R410, R710 and R610 off my SAN maybe with either 10GB links or just some FC 4gb Nics that I can find in the trash outside of my office... 

 

Anyways, thank you and @Lurick for all the help.  I'm sure I'll be back with updates and issues soon enough.  

Why not use something like Nutanix Community Edition and use distributed storage with SSD caching support?

[Nikolithebear]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Why not use something like Nutanix Community Edition and use distributed storage with SSD caching support?

I have never actually heart of that.  One that  I saw planning on testing was StarWind SAN which is a free vSAN Software to my knowledge. 

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Nikolithebear said:

I have never actually heart of that.  One that  I saw planning on testing was StarWind SAN which is a free vSAN Software to my knowledge. 

Nutanix is wayy better than StarWind. The Community Edition runs their own hypervisor which is KVM based but you can run the paid editions on ESXi and Hyper-V. We're moving everything off HP hosts and Netapp SANs at work to all Nutanix on ESXi.

[Nikolithebear]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Nutanix is wayy better than StarWind. The Community Editions runs their own hypervisor which is KVM based but you can run the paid editions on ESXi and Hyper-V. We're moving everything off HP hosts and Netapp SANs at work to all Nutanix on ESXi.

Very neat!  I'm defiantly going to look into that. I'm almost tempted to see how freenas works with the netapp device so I can use ZFS and implement Raid 6.  I havent really used storage spaces very much.  Most of my expeirence is with Windows Server 2012 and R2. 

Edit: Or Xpenology  

[JoshuaTurnwell]

On 8/11/2017 at 6:00 PM, leadeater said:

Nutanix is wayy better than StarWind. The Community Edition runs their own hypervisor which is KVM based but you can run the paid editions on ESXi and Hyper-V. We're moving everything off HP hosts and Netapp SANs at work to all Nutanix on ESXi.

If I do understand correctly, for all scenarios (KVM, ESXi, Hyper-V), Nutanix runs inside the VM while other vSAN-like solutions do not. For example, StarWind is native for Windows environments, Ceph and ZFS for Unix-like ones, VMware VSAN for vSphere. Could you share why Nutanix is better for the particular case of Windows Server-based SAN?

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, JoshuaTurnwell said:

If I do understand correctly, for all scenarios (KVM, ESXi, Hyper-V), Nutanix runs inside the VM while other vSAN-like solutions do not. For example, StarWind is native for Windows environments, Ceph and ZFS for Unix-like ones, VMware VSAN for vSphere. Could you share why Nutanix is better for the particular case of Windows Server-based SAN?

StarWind also uses a VM for non Hyper-V deployments, Ceph and ZFS aren't really the same as HCI solutions on the market but you can configure KVM systems to use them and get a HCI setup.

 

VMware VSAN is one of the more direct comparable solutions to Nutanix since both were designed for HCI out of the box solutions, there is also Simplivity plus others on the market. Nutanix does have the downside of requiring a quite large VM on each host but it is a much more feature complete solution than VMware VSAN is.

[Mikensan]

29 minutes ago, leadeater said:

StarWind also uses a VM for non Hyper-V deployments, Ceph and ZFS aren't really the same as HCI solutions on the market but you can configure KVM systems to use them and get a HCI setup.

 

VMware VSAN is one of the more direct comparable solutions to Nutanix since both were designed for HCI out of the box solutions, there is also Simplivity plus others on the market. Nutanix does have the downside of requiring a quite large VM on each host but it is a much more feature complete solution than VMware VSAN is.

So now I'm curious as well - would these HCI solutions (minus the redundancy) be akin to running FreeNAS as a VM with HBA passthrough?

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Mikensan said:

So now I'm curious as well - would these HCI solutions (minus the redundancy) be akin to running FreeNAS as a VM with HBA passthrough?

That doesn't scale across multiple nodes unless you have something like Gluster or Ceph in front of the FreeNAS storage then you're adding a bunch of complexity and VM dependency and startup order issues before hosted VMs can even work. You'd be better off running a Linux VM with ZFS + Gluster/Ceph all in one.

 

Enterprise HCI also has a lot more to them than just pooling storage in and across nodes though. They have VM provisioning portals and automation APIs, snapshot with VM guest file level restore capability, very good performance monitoring etc.

 

Nutanix Community edition has all the features enabled and the only restirction is a maximum of 4 nodes and you must use the KVM hypervisor called Acropolis and not ESXi or Hyper-V (not that Nutanix recommends Hyper-V that much).

[Mikensan]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

That doesn't scale across multiple nodes unless you have something like Gluster or Ceph in front of the FreeNAS storage then you're adding a bunch of complexity and VM dependency and startup order issues before hosted VMs can even work. You'd be better off running a Linux VM with ZFS + Gluster/Ceph all in one.

 

Enterprise HCI also has a lot more to them than just pooling storage in and across nodes though. They have VM provisioning portals and automation APIs, snapshot with VM guest file level restore capability, very good performance monitoring etc.

 

Nutanix Community edition has all the features enabled and the only restirction is a maximum of 4 nodes and you must use the KVM hypervisor called Acropolis and not ESXi or Hyper-V (not that Nutanix recommends Hyper-V that much).

Yea as I read some more on their website (and reddit) I started thinking about gluster/ceph. Since CVM was virtual it lead me to comparing FreeNAS as a VM hosting the datastore at least. Initially I thought it was similar to vSAN so I thought freenas + vsan = similar config. I see some of the differences now.

 

What I couldn't really find any information on is how nutanix handles nodes with different sets of hardware. With vmware they have EVC via vCenter, so would nutanix be able to support this? It's an issue I have now since one server has a L5520 in one server and an X5670 in another. Looks like OP has a mixture and possibly in a similar scenario. Is CVM (besides being a storage controller) a replacement for vCenter?

 

Sorry to derail a little but hopefully some of this is helpful for OP?