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FreeNAS as Fileserver to host IIS

UserSN

Hey Guys,

 

I've built a freenas box with the intention of hosting IIS website files on it, that would be ISCSI'd into my hyper-v VM IIS machines. I can either host the VM files themselves or just the root directories of IIS.

My question is if I isci then I can only bind 1 vdev to 1VM not 1vdev to multiple VM's. I don't think SAMBA would be a good route as the files would need to be accessible all the time from the VM and i've had weird issues where a SAMBA share gets disconnected. Are there any other ways or ideas you guys can recommend for this type of setup? 

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Samba should work fine here, its pretty relialbe if setup right.

 

You can use cluster shared volumes if you want the same files on each server, and have multiple servers sharing one iscsi target.

 

Otherwise iscsi will work fine here.

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12 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Samba should work fine here, its pretty relialbe if setup right.

 

You can use cluster shared volumes if you want the same files on each server, and have multiple servers sharing one iscsi target.

 

Otherwise iscsi will work fine here.

Ideally I would have 2 vm's accessing the same files so I can load balance across two IIS servers. I'll take a look at cluster shared volumes

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20 minutes ago, zhnu said:

You shouldn't serve websites from remote storage single instance setup (it's a non redundant point of failure)

Can you elaborate a little bit more on this? I didn't quite catch what you mean?

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Thanks zhnu i understand now. The intention was to eliminate as many single points of failure as possible, I have 2 FreeNAS servers so i'm planning on backing up my primary with my secondary.

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45 minutes ago, UserSN said:

Thanks zhnu i understand now. The intention was to eliminate as many single points of failure as possible, I have 2 FreeNAS servers so i'm planning on backing up my primary with my secondary.

Well freenas doesn't really support clusters so it won't be great here. 

 

You can use something like ceph or cluster to have 2 systems with redundant storage between them. But since your on widnows, storage spaces direct is probalby what you want to use here. 

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Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Well freenas doesn't really support clusters so it won't be great here. 

 

You can use something like ceph or cluster to have 2 systems with redundant storage between them. But since your on widnows, storage spaces direct is probalby what you want to use here. 

I cant ISCI some drives into windows and then use storage spaces?

 

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Just now, UserSN said:

I cant ISCI some drives into windows and then use storage spaces?

 

Storage spaces direct is used to make a redundant volume across multiple servers. Then either server can fail and you have redundant storage.

 

ISCSI lets you share a block device over a network. It doesn't have any redundancy built in. Normally if you want rendundacny, you need a san or simmilar with redundancy so you can assume the iscsi target won't go down, then use something like cluster shared volumes in windows to have multiple servers mount.

 

 

What hardware do you have? Id probalby replan the whole setup from the looks of it. Probably run hypervisors on all systems and run it in a cluster.

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1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Storage spaces direct is used to make a redundant volume across multiple servers. Then either server can fail and you have redundant storage.

 

ISCSI lets you share a block device over a network. It doesn't have any redundancy built in. Normally if you want rendundacny, you need a san or simmilar with redundancy so you can assume the iscsi target won't go down, then use something like cluster shared volumes in windows to have multiple servers mount.

 

 

What hardware do you have? Id probalby replan the whole setup from the looks of it. Probably run hypervisors on all systems and run it in a cluster.

I have 7 physical servers, 2 of them for freenas the rest running windows. Inside my 5 servers I have a whole bunch of VM's 2 for SQL in always on and the rest are AD, IIS, ARR, DNS VM's. I have 3 switches for redundancy all machines have 2 or more power supplies.

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1 minute ago, UserSN said:

I have 7 physical servers, 2 of them for freenas the rest running windows. Inside my 5 servers I have a whole bunch of VM's 2 for SQL in always on and the rest are AD, IIS, ARR, DNS VM's. I have 3 switches for redundancy all machines have 2 or more power supplies.

You can make a setup on the freenas systems with redundant storage if you want, so it will appear as one redundant volume using something like ceph.

 

What are you using for vms? Are all the windows boxes just running hyper-v?

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21 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can make a setup on the freenas systems with redundant storage if you want, so it will appear as one redundant volume using something like ceph.

 

What are you using for vms? Are all the windows boxes just running hyper-v?

Correct everything is in Hyper-V because I initially converted all the physical machines to VM's in stages now everything is in a VM but i never got to implement ESXI which seems the better solution but at this point there's no way I can switch as I have things running on the servers and I cannot go offline so I'm trying to segment my VM's the best I can which were running off of the RAID array's on the physical machines themselves. Now I've added these 2 freenas servers into the mix thinking I can offload the VM files onto these freenas boxes and add some load balancing by duplicating my IIS VM's and using something like failover clustering but i got stuck when I wasn't able to ISCSI the same vdev into two VM's at once.

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7 hours ago, UserSN said:

Correct everything is in Hyper-V because I initially converted all the physical machines to VM's in stages now everything is in a VM but i never got to implement ESXI which seems the better solution but at this point there's no way I can switch as I have things running on the servers and I cannot go offline so I'm trying to segment my VM's the best I can which were running off of the RAID array's on the physical machines themselves. Now I've added these 2 freenas servers into the mix thinking I can offload the VM files onto these freenas boxes and add some load balancing by duplicating my IIS VM's and using something like failover clustering but i got stuck when I wasn't able to ISCSI the same vdev into two VM's at once.

Hyper-v will work fine here, no reason to switch to esxi.

 

 

You can have 2 systems use one iscsi target, but you need something like clustered shared volumes for it to work right.

 

Are the hyper-v servers in a cluster? Id put them all in one cluster together.

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11 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Hyper-v will work fine here, no reason to switch to esxi.

 

 

You can have 2 systems use one iscsi target, but you need something like clustered shared volumes for it to work right.

 

Are the hyper-v servers in a cluster? Id put them all in one cluster together.

There not in a cluster currently but I can set that up. I've already looked up some videos on it on youtube so I'll give that a try.

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2 hours ago, UserSN said:

There not in a cluster currently but I can set that up. I've already looked up some videos on it on youtube so I'll give that a try.

are all the system in active directory? Id make sure there all in AD

 

 

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6 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

are all the system in active directory? Id make sure there all in AD

 

 

All my VM's are in AD but not the host machines

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Just now, UserSN said:

All my VM's are in AD but not the host machines

Yea put the hosts all in AD, then make them a cluster. Then you can do live migration between them aswell.

 

Id setup storage spaces direct, and lower the amount of systems used. What is the usage on your hyper-v hosts?

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1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yea put the hosts all in AD, then make them a cluster. Then you can do live migration between them aswell.

 

Id setup storage spaces direct, and lower the amount of systems used. What is the usage on your hyper-v hosts?

The reason I didn't add the hosts to AD is because I have my DC as a VM, I have 3 DC's across different nodes but just in case something happens I didn't want to get locked out if all 3 DC's fail for some reason, do you have any recommendations on this? I'm not sure storage spaces is needed if I have my 2 FreeNAS boxes?

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Just now, UserSN said:

The reason I didn't add the hosts to AD is because I have my DC as a VM, I have 3 DC's across different nodes but just in case something happens I didn't want to get locked out if all 3 DC's fail for some reason, do you have any recommendations on this? I'm not sure storage spaces is needed if I have my 2 FreeNAS boxes?

You can do the DC as a vm in hyper-v. I do it and its a supported use case. AD caches logins so it will still let you login without a DC, or use a local account.

 

Id still replace the freenas seervers and just run it all on the windows cluster.

 

Id probalby turn some of those servers off, they seem overkill for the amount of vms you listed.

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23 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can do the DC as a vm in hyper-v. I do it and its a supported use case. AD caches logins so it will still let you login without a DC, or use a local account.

 

Id still replace the freenas seervers and just run it all on the windows cluster.

 

Id probalby turn some of those servers off, they seem overkill for the amount of vms you listed.

I've been googling storage spaces and see they don't recommend to use it on top of hardware raid so i'd have to get HBA cards for the majority of my servers. Just wanted to check with you on this?

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44 minutes ago, UserSN said:

I've been googling storage spaces and see they don't recommend to use it on top of hardware raid so i'd have to get HBA cards for the majority of my servers. Just wanted to check with you on this?

Yea you don't get full functionality of storage spaces on hardware raid.

 

What specs are the servers?

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6 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yea you don't get full functionality of storage spaces on hardware raid.

 

What specs are the servers?

4 of them are: (1x FreeNAS, 3x Windows)

Dual Xeon L5640's, 48gb mem, LSI/Adaptec Raid Card, 4x wd 7200rpm disks (raid10)

 

2 of them are: (both windows)

Dual Xeon E5-2690's, 128gb mem, LSI/Adaptec Raid Card, 8x wd 7200rpm disks (raid10)

 

Primary FileServer (FreeNAS)

Quad Xeon e7-4800 V2's, 128gb mem, 2x LSI HBA Cards, 8x wd red SSD's, 10x wd red HDD's 7200rpm
 

I think with the setup I have now my only option at the moment is to use FreeNAS and set the drives in a cluster as you recommended so I can utilize ISCSI on multiple VM's and then eventually reformat the two FreeNAS boxes into Windows at the same time upgrade the RaidCards to HBA's but I'm 5hours from the hosting center so I can't get access to the machines physically at a moments notice and I have sites running currently across all nodes except the freenas boxes =(.

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2 hours ago, UserSN said:

4 of them are: (1x FreeNAS, 3x Windows)

Dual Xeon L5640's, 48gb mem, LSI/Adaptec Raid Card, 4x wd 7200rpm disks (raid10)

 

2 of them are: (both windows)

Dual Xeon E5-2690's, 128gb mem, LSI/Adaptec Raid Card, 8x wd 7200rpm disks (raid10)

 

Primary FileServer (FreeNAS)

Quad Xeon e7-4800 V2's, 128gb mem, 2x LSI HBA Cards, 8x wd red SSD's, 10x wd red HDD's 7200rpm
 

I think with the setup I have now my only option at the moment is to use FreeNAS and set the drives in a cluster as you recommended so I can utilize ISCSI on multiple VM's and then eventually reformat the two FreeNAS boxes into Windows at the same time upgrade the RaidCards to HBA's but I'm 5hours from the hosting center so I can't get access to the machines physically at a moments notice and I have sites running currently across all nodes except the freenas boxes =(.

man you must love paying for power.

 

Id probably setup those freenas boxes to do everything on them, but if you want to keep everything running, id just use storage spaces direct to make shared storage.

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