New file server ideas.

[ring.of.steel]

Simply, i have 10x320gb's set up in a raidz volume shared out by samba over the network. The problem is samba doesnt play nice with zfs so i decided my windows 2003 box could come into play. I have this poweredge 2400 with dual PIII's with a server 2003 licence.

Would it be practical to run the setup like this,

RAIDZ@SOLARIS>[[iscsi]]>SERVER2003>[[windowsfilesharing]]>windows clients

Would this slow things down a lot? and would it be practical to use?

[axan]

well that would add some overhead, it all depends on how many users would be accessing the shares, also is this on gigabit network or 100mb?

[ring.of.steel]

Would be gigabit crossover between the file server and the windows 2003 box, 5 clients average but i copy some pretty big files. What i dont want is slow performance while browsing shares.

[axan]

With the dedicated 1 gbit crossover between file server and win2003 box I think it will work just fine, btw what exactly is samba's problem with zfs? Just curious cuz my freebsd server will eventually use zfs and i use samba on it too.

[ring.of.steel]

I think it will work just fine, btw what exactly is samba's problem with zfs? Just curious cuz my freebsd server will eventually use zfs and i use samba on it too.

Hold on a second it wont work, becuase if it is shared as an iscsi taget windows will read it as a zfs volume wont it... and windows doesnt have a clue what zfs is...

My problems with zfs and samba have been that sometimes the solaris box decides to deny write access to all the clients and everything comes to a halt.

[axan]

umm well i don't know how iscsi works on your solaris system but on my freebsd, i create iscsi target sepcify location and the size of the target, then on windows I connect to the iscsi target, windows sees this as a raw new hdd, you format it with ntfs then it becomes just another drive as far as windows is concerned.

[ring.of.steel]

umm well i don't know how iscsi works on your solaris system but on my freebsd, i create iscsi target sepcify location and the size of the target, then on windows I connect to the iscsi target, windows sees this as a raw new hdd, you format it with ntfs then it becomes just another drive as far as windows is concerned.

On the bsd system are you using any kind of software raid? and is the drive used as an iscsi target formatted with a linux file system allready?

[axan]

it's hardware raid and yes the array is formated as ufs, the iscsi target is a file on that drive.
So in practice it looks like this
8x500gb drives on rocketraid 2320 formated ufs and mounted on /mnt/hptraid
then in that directory i have file called iscsi_target0 which is my 1tb iscsi target.
so on the freebsd end the array is formated as ufs but on windows end the iscsi target is ntfs.
On top of that the rest of the array's space is shared with windows clients using samba so the /mnt/hptraid directory has whole bunch of other stuff aside from the iscsi_target0 file.

[ring.of.steel]

Ahh so the iscsi target will show up as a file on the zfs file system, i get it now. Hmm im not too keen on the idea becuase what if that iscsi target file gets corrupted.. data gone...

[axan]

i guess it's a risk, although i've been running my iscsi for over a year without any problems

[ring.of.steel]

yeah i guess so, il probably do this if i cant get samba to work. its just that i would like windows server as a kind of 'frontend'

[axan]

it just occurred to me that with the sweet features of zfs like self healing, chances corruption of the iscsi target file are pretty slim. Zfs is pretty sweet file system and I can't wait for zfs support in freenas.

[ring.of.steel]

it just occurred to me that with the sweet features of zfs like self healing, chances corruption of the iscsi target file are pretty slim. Zfs is pretty sweet file system and I can't wait for zfs support in freenas.

Yeah zfs is pretty advanced in terms of file systems,with zfs being a sun microsystems product i highly reccomend using solaris for zfs if your using raid-z. Running third party code isnt really good practise.

[axan]

well zfs is open source and it was ported to freebsd, i just need to wait for freenas team to build new release based on freebsd 7, probably few months wait, which is kinda good timing as I will prob run out of storage space in 6-8 months, I would like to move to zfs next time I expand my file server.

[ring.of.steel]

Yeah it was ported to freebsd, but i have read that it doesnt live up to what it is on solaris. i have set this all up in a vmware enviroment, but i/o is stupidly slow [1mb/s] this may be becuase of vmware i dont know.

[axan]

Well like i said i got 6months + before I'll make any changes hopefully the code matures by then, I like the powerful features and simplicity of freenas but i'm not opposed to going to solaris or other os if makes better sense.

[ring.of.steel]

Yeah i see what you meen, i have found solaris to be as simple to manage as freenas, all the commands are simple and they have logic behind then. example to create a raidz set

zpool create steel raidz c1t0d3 c1t0d4 c1t0d5 c1t0d6
Disks to add
Name of array
Type of array

this would set the mountpoint /steel and it would all ready to use ;)