help deciding best network solution

[duality]

HI Guys,

I purchased one of the HP Microservers (N36L - dual core 1.3ghz) and i currently have 8Gb of ram installed. I haven't got any hard drives in it at the moment but i plan on getting 2x 2Tb disks initially and then adding a further 2 (and maybe also buying the 4x 2.5in cd bay converter that has been mentioned a few times).

I'm kind of struggling with which way to go about this. My current setup is a standard house network with linksys router (which i will be upgrading and also investing in a gb switch). I have a netgear readynas with 4x 750gb hdd (probably upgrading to 4x 2tb soon too) and is the main storage,torrent server, media streaming server for the house.

So what i want to do...I want the microserver to be a domain controller for the house, fileserver, torrent server, media streaming server, backup of other machines and possibly firewall. I then want to retire the readynas into a backup device for key data on the microserver. I'm think virtualisation is the best way to go...(Linux distro can be the torrent client and streaming maybe, win2k8 for fileserving/backup/user info e.t.c)...

I've heard the server has fake raid so the first question is should i go for software raid (zfs?) or hardware raid?
Then the os - i was initially thinking esxi with win2008 mapping to the direct storage for data/backups e.t.c and a few linux clients for everything else. I read someone tried that and the transfer speads were very poor. So my options now seem to be as follows:

• windows 2008 r2 as the host os/domain controller - vmware or hyperv installed on their for 2 linux machines (is it a gd idea to have vmwares on my domain controller?)
• linux as the host with ZFS to the storage and vmware for win2k8 domain/linux and shares mapped
• if linux which distro should i choose

if i go the hardware raid then would drivers e.t.c work fine under linux or is it best for windows?

What are your views on the above and any other options i may have?

Thank you in advance for any help!!

 

[Red Falcon]

Hardware RAID works great under any platform.

Software RAID is good for unix-like OSes such as OS X or Linux distros.

FakeRAID is good for Windows due to high/good driver support.

Just FYI, if your server has FakeRAID, then your only options are FakeRAID, software RAID (controlled through the OS), or ZFS (also controlled through OS).

You can only do hardware RAID if you have a motherboard or an expansion card which actually supports it. FakeRAID is not hardware RAID.

The best is ZFS due to its error correction and robust RAID engine, but this is only offered under a Solaris-type OS for the latest stable release.

Linux has great software RAID support and is by far the best for non-enterprise class HDDs for compatibility and transferring the RAID array from one system to another.

2008R2 is good if you use FakeRAID, but honestly, I would only use FakeRAID if it were a workstation or a server with non-mission critical data.

 

[Jesse B]

I feel it's worth adding that BSD derivatives also support ZFS, but the versions are behind that which are available on Solaris.

 

[duality]

Thanks and apologies for the late reply,

I have decided i will get a raid controller and go with ZFS. so the setup will be:
OS with ZFS for storage.
Vmware or virtual box installed.
virtual machines:
win server 2008 - dhcp, dns, and domain controller - provided users with shares from the zfs pool
Linux - local website, dev and mess about, streaming from zfs pool
light Linux - torrents, and any other stuff

I'm in 2 minds about which os to choose though - i prefer linux and would love to use vmware on it for my virtual machines but i've heard the ZFS support isn't as good as solaris on there? Solaris route will mean going with virtual box which i don't have much experience with but will mean i can use all the pre designed tools and gui to easily manage my ZFS pool.

 

[GeorgeHR]

So how much data are you intending to move around? How fast do you need to move it?

To me residential RAID seems to be a poor choice. A 1GB network will not notice the difference between a RAID and no RAID.

 

[TeeJayHoward]

Which is more important, uptime or capacity? A pool of disks allows for additional capacity, but if a drive fails, you're spending hours rebuilding from backup, and the pool is offline while you do it. A raid allows you to replace the broken disk at your leisure. Neither one qualifies as a backup solution!

Do you want to be able to install additional drives at a later date without backing up your data? If so, you need a solution capable of online capacity expansion. Most hardware raid setups allow for this these days. I don't believe Windows dynamic disk "raid" does. ZFS is great at it. I think WHS supports it.

Do you want to be able to install additional disks of differing sizes at a later date, or do you plan on replacing all disks with same-size ones? Unless something has changed since I looked at it 3-4 years ago, you must have the same sized disks when expanding an array if you have a hardware raid configuration. Same with Windows dynamic disk arrays. ZFS allows you to pool disks of varying sizes. I believe Windows Home Server had a similar feature. It may be hard to find 2TB disks 5 years from now when 10TB is the standard.

If your computer breaks, do you want to be able to recover the data, or would you restore from backups? Windows fakeraids don't work very well if you pull the disks and put them in another computer. ZFS works wonderfully. Hardware raids (generally) work okay if you bring the controller over to the new box too.

Do you need to be able to dynamically shrink your array? If you went from 10x2TB disks to 9x3TB disks, you would gain capacity, but lose a drive. It's not possible to remove a spindle from a zpool without destroying the array. With a JBOD configuration, you could add or remove drives at a whim, and only lose the data contained on that one drive - Which you can copy to another before removing.

Do you want to learn something new, or would you rather go with something you know? WHS is easy to set up and configure. ZFS is a mystery to anyone who's never touched a *NIX box before. Hardware raid has like 3 options, so it's almost impossible to screw up.

Is speed important to you? If you're transferring large datasets across the network frequently, it might be worth it to get something speedy (Hardware raid or ZFS on bare metal). If you're just watching a .MKV every now and then, anything will do.

Do you plan on using advanced format drives? Some drivers for certain controllers don't allow for drives over 2TB to be used. The same controller may work just fine under a different OS. For example, my 3TB drives won't show up as 3TB in Windows 7 x64 - They're 740GB or so. With the exact same hardware in Solaris 11, the full 3TB is accessable.

if i go the hardware raid then would drivers e.t.c work fine under linux or is it best for windows?

Most controllers these days have drivers that work in Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows. Always a good idea to check, but it's not the worry it was several years ago.

if linux which distro should i choose

Most controllers that support linux will be Red Hat certified, or Red Hat compatible, or some other such nonsense. Fedora Core is basically Red Hat for enthusiasts. CentOS is basically Red Hat for enterprise folk who don't need the support contract. Heck, you can probably still get official Red Hat if you poke around their site long enough.

So obviously, I'm going to recommend Ubuntu

 

[Jesse B]

So obviously, I'm going to recommend Ubuntu

LOL.

If you're wanting to go with Linux, anything Red Hat or Debian based would be my first choice.

 

[Vengance_01]

I am thinking you should use a ZFS based build with Solaris and then use Virtual box. This way ZFS is running natively, and the rest of your needs could be windows or other nix based solutions in a VM environment. The HP server has room for a additional PCI-e slot which I would recommend adding a cheap Intel single or dual port 1 gig and use the on-board for NAS traffic only. This is my plan. My box should be here tomorrow.

 

[duality]

Thanks for all the great responses guys, to answer some questions:

the server is completely for home use, therefore capacity is more important than uptime (as long as i can get a virtual machine with the win 2k8 domain up and running which will be on a seperate drive). I currently have a readynas with 4x 750gb disks (which are full) so i'm looking at using this machine as the main backup for my home network and then upgrade the hdd in the readynas to back up this machine.

i probably would want to expand but that'll be quite far down and i might just replace the existing disks than expand. I definately want to be able to use varying sized disks though and i would want to recover data, not all data will be backed up only the important stuff. Anything else will be volatile i.e if i can recover it'll be great if not then i'll download again lol.

Speed is not important, as long as i can transfer a movie once in a while to the ps3 i'm fine! and i can even leave it running over night - not worried about it. I'm more interested in storage and backup than speed.

Data to move around won't be much. I do audio editing work and that is my most important data!! which is about 10gb+ a week but that is all done on my laptop. Once edited and converted the mp3's are transfered to the nas so data to move around will be less than 2gb a week (very small!).

The main reason for this purchase is my readynas began life as a backup device. It's now the sole storage for all the network, personal files and mp3's/movies e.t.c with No Backup!! - so this microserver will become the sole storage and have everything on it with a domain controller and the Readynas will backup the microserver.

I'm thinking that a ZFS array will def be the best for me and purchase a raid controller to connect up the hard drives (rather than using the internal fake raid port). And later get a second network card to ease the load.

Now just to choose between ubuntu, red-hat, debian or solaris for my zfs...any preferences?

 

[Ross1]

Do you want to be able to install additional drives at a later date without backing up your data? If so, you need a solution capable of online capacity expansion. Most hardware raid setups allow for this these days. I don't believe Windows dynamic disk "raid" does. ZFS is great at it. I think WHS supports it.

I have used the windows dynamic thing for disks of different size before, and it works fine. Each drive is essentially just JBOD and stuck together.

In fact I still use it for one of my arrays.

 

[Dangman]

Now just to choose between ubuntu, red-hat, debian or solaris for my zfs...any preferences?

Last I checked, ZFS and Linux didn't work all that well. So basically that leaves Solaris, FreeBSD, FreeNAS (older revision IIRC), and other similar OS types for ZFS.

 

[Jesse B]

Now just to choose between ubuntu, red-hat, debian or solaris for my zfs...any preferences?

While ZFS is supported in Linux via Fuse, it doesn't work so well; you'll want to stick with a BSD or Solaris derivative if you go with ZFS. ZFSGuru, OpenFiler, FreeNAS and OpenIndiana are some of the more popular options.

If you did want to use Linux, that its own software RAID is pretty good, and performs quite well. It doesn't have error checking like ZFS has though.