Freenas storage and motherboard advice

[cgtechuk]

Hi all. Got a fair amount of drives and servers on the go at the moment basically 2x ml310e g8 hp servers running vms in vmware each have raid 5 with 4 x Wd 3tb on them each and I need more storage 

Now there is two 5.25 bays at the top I can put a hot swap dock in but am I keen on building a nas to also take care of backups. As I find 50  UK pounds for a small caddy expensive 

 

I have a pile of 1tb and 2tb disks I could put in it and use freenas and an iscsi setup to mount to vmware but what sort of mb and cpu power would I need for that? Would performance be decent? Currently got a amd a6 5400 and a gigabyte board with 8 data ports is that strong enough? 

I am probably going to use the nzxt gamer 210 elite  case as suggested in the wiki. But given thay I have I dunno 8 x 2tb and 1tb drives should I sell them and buy less but bigger drives for freenas? 

All help greatly appreciated

[Electronics Wizardy]

That amd board should be more than enough. 

 

Case looks good, holds lots of drives.

 

For mixed drives sizes, You could use something like btrfs, but that only give you raid 1/10(raid 5/6 is beta). Id probably stay away from a pooling solution for vm's, as it will be slower. ZFS likes drives of the same size.

 

 

Id personally run linux, like centos.

[Droidbot]

I'd suggest OMV (open media vault) - it's debian based with a really good web interface and rock solid reliability - but if you're set on FreeNas, it's your choice 

[cgtechuk]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

That amd board should be more than enough. 

 

Case looks good, holds lots of drives.

 

For mixed drives sizes, You could use something like btrfs, but that only give you raid 1/10(raid 5/6 is beta). Id probably stay away from a pooling solution for vm's, as it will be slower. ZFS likes drives of the same size.

 

 

Id personally run linux, like centos.

 

That is good to hear about the board. I know that the max throughput at the moment will just need to saturate a GBe line which should be fine I think for iScsi but whatever I decide nic teaming is a must as they have quad Ethernet cards and also a smart switch. Drives wise I think left over I have 4 maybe 5 2TB drives and 4 x 1s , A five and a couple of 8s  so a real mixed bag., Whatever I do I plan on pairing them by platter so make a volume of 2s a volumes of 1s etc so the mixing of sizes would be less of an issue I believe. I MIGHT even just put Esxi on it and nest the FreeNas as a virt but not sure how much that will affect performance although does provide scalability

 

Basically the choice i have is cough up nearly £100 for two Hot Swap enclosures in the current servers or build a dedicated NAS that just handles the media traffic, Which although would end up using more power is probably my preffered solution as it will also mean its isolated from Server issues but will need to be mounted to the other ESXi hosts.

 

Hope that makes sense l;ol

 

 

2 hours ago, Droidbot said:

I'd suggest OMV (open media vault) - it's debian based with a really good web interface and rock solid reliability - but if you're set on FreeNas, it's your choice 

 

Hi there, thanks for your reply I am not really that set on OS it just has to conform to what I need it to do, I am quite comfortable with BSD, Linux and Windows so either is fine but I prefer the option of choice so any soluition I simply build a test VM and use that before I decide.

 

 

Overall,

 

I currently have a Fractal Define R5 case that I can possibly use to house the drives and the motherboard I have lying around but I am missing the lower drive cage which I would need to give me the full 8 drives, And the cost of replacing that is the same price as the whole NZXT case itself or a set of hot swap bays. 

 

Ultimately the AMD board and CPU iis a good fit for JBOD type setup as its got 8 sata 3 ports on one controller on the board. I do like raid though so recommendations of a decent but budget / Old Entrerprise raid card is also welcome. I am still at the designing stage so nothing is out the equation cost aside though as its not needing to be OTT I do like the silverstone case but I cant justfify £150 on a case that doesnt fit my MB and needs an ITX and probably an HBA

[Droidbot]

2 minutes ago, cgtechuk said:

-s n i p b o y s - 

You could use 5.25in bays as HDD bays if you really wanted to, which could be useful for the DR5

[cgtechuk]

12 minutes ago, Droidbot said:

You could use 5.25in bays as HDD bays if you really wanted to, which could be useful for the DR5

This is true but the R5 only has 2 x 5.25 bays so the max number of drives you can fir without hotswap is 2 and with the hotswap bays is 3 which isnt really enough. I would prefer the lower cage to give me 8 sleds in total and leave the top for expansion.

The other option of course is to consolidate, so sell the 4 x 1s for a 4 and sell 2 lots of 2 for another 2 x 4 that would mean less spinning platters but more eggs in one basket so to speak

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 hours ago, cgtechuk said:

I MIGHT even just put Esxi on it and nest the FreeNas as a virt

n reason to do that and that would only make freenas worse as freenas wants direct access to drives, or a hba passthrough.

 

Id probably try to get all of one drive size if you can.