Can't decide OS for my server

N

NfiniteZERO

n00b
Joined
Feb 9, 2005
Messages
23
Hey y'all.

I'm stuck in a rut right now and can't pick which route I want to go with my server. It's coming down to a ZFS based NAS running Solaris and Windows Home Server.

The main aim of the server project is to store my movies and stream them to a low power HTPC box. I'm planning on using MyMovies3 from Binnerup (www.mymovies.dk) to do collection management duties. Ideally, I'd like to keep the database it creates on the server just so I don't have more databases to manage/update and all those fun headaches. I'd also like it to be easily expandable when the time comes since my collection is always growing (and will be transitioning to BluRay here soon).

Here's the issues I seem to run into:
  • WHSv2 drops Drive Extender and replaces it with single drive or RAID. This adds cost, complexity, and headache.
  • MyMovies3 uses MS's SQL Server. Looking around on the net yields nothing in regards to running the DB on MySQL or equivalent.
  • Ease of expansion - From what I understand ZFS wins here, but to expand a hardware RAID setup takes a lot more time from and a bit more hassle.

I'm hoping to get some input here from people far wiser than I in this sort of regard. I've built frugal gaming boxes and high end machines, but the server world is unfamiliar territory for me. I'm open to options too, just don't use big scary server words too much or my brain will melt :D
 
NfiniteZERO said:
Ease of expansion - From what I understand ZFS wins here, but to expand a hardware RAID setup takes a lot more time from and a bit more hassle.
Click to expand...

No way for ZFS and ease of expansion versus hardware RAID. ZFS has no standard online capacity expansion like basically any other RAID setup out there. You basically increase storage sets by adding another set of say three or more drives for RAID-Z or four or more drives for RAID-Z2 and add those to an existing pool. To achieve a similar online capacity expansion capability you cannot just add one drive to a ten drive RAID-Z2 array and have the RAID-Z2 array just expand to encompass that drive.

Honestly, this is probably the biggest issue I have with ZFS right now, otherwise it is great. When you have 15+ drives, the ZFS style expansion is no big deal since adding 3-4 or more drives at a time is less of a shock.

One thought for you, why not run a Windows instance in a VM somewhere just to host the database? The DB + OS install will be <10-20GB which is nothing in a big storage array.
 
pjkenned said:
When you have 15+ drives, the ZFS style expansion is no big deal since adding 3-4 or more drives at a time is less of a shock.
Click to expand...

I've got no definite roadmap for this project but I can see myself expanding my storage in a manner like this. On the RAID side of the house, I know about adding single drives but how does that play into data availability and shuffling around the parity data for that new drive? (Sorry if this seems noobish, but my only experience with RAID is the fake kind that comes with motherboards)

The VM idea is interesting. I might just have to play around with that.
 
There are other media aggregators, some of which do use mysql. Just a thought.
 
topcat989 said:
Have you checked out unRAID?

I like it myself
Click to expand...

I gave it a passing glance - I don't have any hardware that I'd be "recycling" into this project otherwise it would be a contender for sure. The only downside is the drive limit in the pro version. 21 isn't very much and I can see me having this server for a while.

benogil said:
There are other media aggregators, some of which do use mysql. Just a thought.
Click to expand...
Got any that you can recommend in a setup like this?

Also, any thoughts about something like this - Using Solaris on the main machine, configure drives/shares through ZFS, and pass them to Windows Home Server (in VM) via iSCSI which should see the shares as individual drives.
 
NfiniteZERO said:
I gave it a passing glance - I don't have any hardware that I'd be "recycling" into this project otherwise it would be a contender for sure. The only downside is the drive limit in the pro version. 21 isn't very much and I can see me having this server for a while.....
Click to expand...

Jebezus, 21 x 3TB drives is not enough?:confused::eek:
 
pjkenned said:
19 drives + 1 parity... with 3TB drives... insane to consider single parity.
Click to expand...
why you dont lose all you data when a drive go dead like whit "normel raid" max 2 drive can you los. when that sid I are going from unraid to zfs solaris but taht it only to get vituel windows7 runing in vituelbox
 
topcat989 said:
Jebezus, 21 x 3TB drives is not enough?:confused::eek:
Click to expand...
Some day it won't be Top ;). Right now the budget for the project hasn't been approved by the powers that be, so I'm going to have to start small and work my way up there. No way am I going to be able to afford 3TB drives from the get-go either. But if I get lucky enough, I'll have quite a few drives when El Huevo has some on sale again.



19 drives + 1 parity... with 3TB drives... insane to consider single parity.
Click to expand...
Absolutely agreed. I plan on keeping my Movies/Music on a Raid-5 and everything important on a Raid 6. Machine backups may be going up on single drives, but haven't thought that far ahead.

I guess I should have clarified that while movies are the big thing going on this box, of course I'll have other files and such to go on there too.
 
tobiasl said:
why you dont lose all you data when a drive go dead like whit "normel raid" max 2 drive can you los. when that sid I are going from unraid to zfs solaris but taht it only to get vituel windows7 runing in vituelbox
Click to expand...

NetApp (poineer in RAID 4 with many times unRAID revenue) says 7 SATA drives max in RAID 4 or 14 fibre channel drives on even their new FAS6200 series (high-end). NetApp's storage platform and ZFS are close enough that there was multi-year litigation on the subject.
 
It seems more and more people are shying away from ZFS recently. I was thinking of going that route but stayed with Linux and mdadm (Raid 6).

Might play around with OpenSolaris as an experiment but Linux software raid has treated me well the past 6 years...
 
NfiniteZERO said:
Doing some more rounds of research on the web, came across this - http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/User+Group+qosug/zfs_iscsi_integration

Seems plausible that I can have my cake and eat it too. Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

This is really old stuff, described in this article.
zfs-property sharescsi is obsolete in modern Opensolaris derived systems like Nexenta*, OpenIndiana or Solaris Express.
They include comstar, a iSCSI framework developped by SUN, much more flexible and much faster than the old sharescsi.

->
Use a modern OpenSolaris ZFS-OS derivate with comstar.
With my napp-it you may manage Comstar completely via web-Gui with one of them.

ps
Free OpenSolaris was cancelled by Oracle last year. They had replaced it with closed Oracle Solaris Express 11.
You can use the free fork OpenIndiana or the OpenSource OS NexentaCore instead.

and i do not think people shy away from ZFS.
there is no other system available free or not, with such a feature-set

- end to end checksum
- online filecheck and refresh to prevent silent data corruption
- copy on write to create snaps without initial extra space or delay
- raid-z 1-3 without write hole
- deduplication
- fast and MS compatible smb server
- hybrid storage
and.....


Gea
 
Last edited:
WHS V1 + Media portal with Streamed MP. I guess My Movies is ok, if you don't mind dealing with all the other incompetencies of WMC ( too many issues for me to use it, I was always going back to VLC or other media players when I would get codec problems, sound issues etc. Plus Streamed MP plays well with TV series as well. Music albums and album art is certainly much better, if a movie is not detecting properly you can always manually inject the IMBD number.

WHS V1 is still the only storage solution that does everything I want + Automated backups. Expands easily, redundancy, nice interface through the clients etc.
 
Justintoxicated said:
WHS V1 + Media portal with Streamed MP. I guess My Movies is ok, if you don't mind dealing with all the other incompetencies of WMC ( too many issues for me to use it, I was always going back to VLC or other media players when I would get codec problems, sound issues etc. Plus Streamed MP plays well with TV series as well. Music albums and album art is certainly much better, if a movie is not detecting properly you can always manually inject the IMBD number.

WHS V1 is still the only storage solution that does everything I want + Automated backups. Expands easily, redundancy, nice interface through the clients etc.
Click to expand...

This is it. In my opinion there is nothing better than WHS V1
 
_Gea said:
This is really old stuff, described in this article.
zfs-property sharescsi is obsolete in modern Opensolaris derived systems like Nexenta*, OpenIndiana or Solaris Express.
They include comstar, a iSCSI framework developped by SUN, much more flexible and much faster than the old sharescsi.

->
Use a modern OpenSolaris ZFS-OS derivate with comstar.
With my napp-it you may manage Comstar completely via web-Gui with one of them.

ps
Free OpenSolaris was cancelled by Oracle last year. They had replaced it with closed Oracle Solaris Express 11.
You can use the free fork OpenIndiana or the OpenSource OS NexentaCore instead.

and i do not think people shy away from ZFS.
there is no other system available free or not, with such a feature-set

- end to end checksum
- online filecheck and refresh to prevent silent data corruption
- copy on write to create snaps without initial extra space or delay
- raid-z 1-3 without write hole
- deduplication
- fast and MS compatible smb server
- hybrid storage
and.....


Gea
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply _Gea. I was kind of waiting for one of the ZFS gurus to pop in and help me decipher that. Yeah, I already know about OpenSolaris closing up shop so I was planning to go with Solaris Express 11 to run ZFS. Right now, the biggest problem I have with my setup is to make everything play well with each other and get the performance needed. Since negotiations are ongoing, all I have is some older hardware to test my theories out.

@Justintoxicated - I'll take a look at that. I liked MyMovies3 because it integrated with WHS but since V2 drops DE, I'm looking at solutions to fill that gap. ZFS is the best all-around solution from what I can find but getting them to play nice seems fairly hard. Even Patrick from ServeTheHome.com has been trying at this for a while with his box.

That said, I'm watching what OEMs are going to be doing with WHSv2 since the RC is out right now so I'm not absolutely dead-set with ZFS, it's just my ideal end-state goal with this project.

Thanks all for your input!
 
NfiniteZERO said:
Thanks for your reply _Gea. I was kind of waiting for one of the ZFS gurus to pop in and help me decipher that. Yeah, I already know about OpenSolaris closing up shop so I was planning to go with Solaris Express 11 to run ZFS. Right now, the biggest problem I have with my setup is to make everything play well with each other and get the performance needed. Since negotiations are ongoing, all I have is some older hardware to test my theories out.

@Justintoxicated - I'll take a look at that. I liked MyMovies3 because it integrated with WHS but since V2 drops DE, I'm looking at solutions to fill that gap. ZFS is the best all-around solution from what I can find but getting them to play nice seems fairly hard. Even Patrick from ServeTheHome.com has been trying at this for a while with his box.

That said, I'm watching what OEMs are going to be doing with WHSv2 since the RC is out right now so I'm not absolutely dead-set with ZFS, it's just my ideal end-state goal with this project.

Thanks all for your input!
Click to expand...

I'm honestly not that familiar with ZFS, is it an expandable software raid solution or does it require hardware raid? If Hardware raid, then I am not interested.

So ZFS will create one large expandable virtual drive like WHS right?
Can you use mismatched drives with it?
Does it support redundancy that can be turned on or off, or is it simply using parity disk/s?
I don't want a parity type system really, regardless if it wastes space. I need a system where if my hardware dies, I can plug one or more drives into another machine and recover data. Technically WHS V1 should do this. Don't get me wrong, do a search and you will see I have had my share of problems with WHS V1, I was extremely disappointed for a while. Still waiting to see what becomes of vail.

Vail to me should have been, W7 style networking, DE having adjustable priority (V1 it is set too high and if you stream it can lead to stuttering so it has to be disabled and re-enabled at night when I'm sleeping), support for larger drives. Then I would have been happy. MS misinterpreted people that complained about DE, we didn't want it removed, we simply wanted it fixed!

As for media centers, I have tried 4 or 5 and while initial setup for media portal has some learning curve I have not had problems playing any movies as I have had through WMC. No matter how you skin it WMC kinda sucks although alot of people seem to really like media browser. XBMC is pretty nifty, but media portal allows for the easy use of plugins. Streamed MP includes and installs some of the most used plugins. I still haven't setup the TV server yet so I can't comment there (maybe this weekend as I'm finishing up my OTA outdoor antenna install). Streamed MP takes the best parts of XBMC and puts them into Media Portal. I even have HULU working through Media portal, although support is still pretty bad for HULU at the moment. I really do not know why anyone would recommend media browser at ths time. I haven't tried the newest Sage TV, but it had a lot less issues than media center, just an ugly interface.

So yea, media portal + streamped MP will do all the indexing for you, just create a network share and point it to it. It will pull Fan Art, album covers, IMBD info and ratings etc. Put all your TV series in another folder and it will do the same for TV series... SO many different layouts and options are available its crazy.
 
Last edited:
There is no os on earth, best for all needs.

I use macs for dtp and media creation. my users are on a windows ad domain, my firewall and my videorecorder
are linux based and my storage systems are mostly build on Nexenta and Solaris*/OpenIndiana.

For a lot of desktop- or mediacenter-use, Windows is the best choice.

ZFS on the other hand, is one of the most sophisticated storage technologies. Its the best choice, if you are building a
storage server with a lot of disks and if you are looking for the highest available data security.

With ZFS, you can build expandable storage pools from hundreds of disks with any controllers and nearly unlimited capacity
based on Software Raid-technologie without the usual write-hole problem of Raid-5 or Raid-6 systems.

ZFS stores information on pools, build from one or more raidsets. Pools can grow nearly unlimited by adding more raidsets.
This is a major difference to other systems like Windows where you store data on raidsets with a limited amount of possible disks.

Because ZFS is software-raid only, you can plugin your disks in another server with any controller and import your pool without problems.
So, It depends whether you are looking for a media center server or a dedicated storage server.


Gea
 
Last edited:
Justintoxicated said:
So ZFS will create one large expandable virtual drive like WHS right?
Can you use mismatched drives with it?
Does it support redundancy that can be turned on or off, or is it simply using parity disk/s?
I don't want a parity type system really, regardless if it wastes space. I need a system where if my hardware dies, I can plug one or more drives into another machine and recover data. Technically WHS V1 should do this. Don't get me wrong, do a search and you will see I have had my share of problems with WHS V1, I was extremely disappointed for a while. Still waiting to see what becomes of vail.
Click to expand...

ZFS is a file-system and a RAID engine. You don't use hardware RAID with it if you want the best performance. It's a really advanced file system that's very scalable. I'll cover what I know (the basics) but for more about it, you should check out sub.mesa's ZFSGuru post.

RAID-Z works like RAID5, RAID-Z2 like RAID6. You can't use mismatched drives since this is a RAID, however since you're not using a hardware RAID card there's no worrying about TLER and all that pain that comes with that route. When it comes time to expand, you have to add the disks in groups (minimum 3 for RAID-Z, 4 for RAID-Z2 iirc), This will make the RAID-Z pool work like RAID50 (60 for Z2).

Like you, I'm watching and waiting what folks are going to do for Vail before I throw down cash on my box. I'll definitely check out streamed MP/Media Portal this weekend.
 
NfiniteZERO said:
ZFS is a file-system and a RAID engine. You don't use hardware RAID with it if you want the best performance. It's a really advanced file system that's very scalable. I'll cover what I know (the basics) but for more about it, you should check out sub.mesa's ZFSGuru post.

RAID-Z works like RAID5, RAID-Z2 like RAID6. You can't use mismatched drives since this is a RAID, however since you're not using a hardware RAID card there's no worrying about TLER and all that pain that comes with that route. When it comes time to expand, you have to add the disks in groups (minimum 3 for RAID-Z, 4 for RAID-Z2 iirc), This will make the RAID-Z pool work like RAID50 (60 for Z2).

Like you, I'm watching and waiting what folks are going to do for Vail before I throw down cash on my box. I'll definitely check out streamed MP/Media Portal this weekend.
Click to expand...

So it's expandable, but matched disks are recommended? (big negative for me)
WHS says what an 8 disk limitation? It's a joke though, tons of people have over 20 disks on WHS. If I am having to purchase 20 disks, (for me) it's likely that I should be replacing disks rather than adding more (too much power usage and expensive controllers needed for this). I have learned NOT to purchase (again for my use) tons of storage up front, drives drop in cost too fast to bother doing that. When I put together my WHS box (2 or 3 years ago) it was $200 for a 1TB drive, so I could have 3 times the storage space for ever one of my 1TB drives... Currently I have 3 different kinds of disks in my storage server.

WHS V1 does not support 3TB drives, so it's not an option if you want to go that route.

I am using mine for more than a media server, I store all kinds of data, plus all my PC's including the HTPC gets backed up nightly. _GEA, I'm not understanding the difference in your classification of a storage server ms a media server? I'd say WHS is a storage server, but what am I mostly storing? - Media... Permissions and redundency can be set at the folder level. But even for data you don't care to have redundancy for will waste space on ZFS then? I mean, it won't waste as much as WHS does so i guess thats a tie?

You should not need WHS to do any kind of media meta data etc, ANY storage server will work with media portal. As long as Media portal can retrieve the folder or file names any storage solution will work for that.

Not trying to steer you away from ZFS (it sounds very good, especially for business uses), just some things to keep in mind, when making your decisions. Is WHS trustworthy? I'm still undecided!
 
Last edited:
Justintoxicated said:
I am using mine for more than a media server, I store all kinds of data, plus all my PC's including the HTPC gets backed up nightly. _GEA, I'm not understanding the difference in your classification of a storage server ms a media server? I'd say WHS is a storage server, but what am I mostly storing? - Media... Permissions and redundency can be set at the folder level. But even for data you don't care to have redundancy for will waste space on ZFS then? I mean, it won't waste as much as WHS does so i guess thats a tie?
Click to expand...

The difference are not storage related add-ons like tv-cards or special media-center software. they all work with Windows, they mostly do not for example with a Solaris based ZFS-OS.

About redundancy. With ZFS you may also build Raid-0 pools without redundancy, but who wants to avoid redundancy? disks are cheap, data is valuable.

Gea
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top