home lab ..NAS storage it has all gone wrong.

A

atarione

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so.. I recently built (repuposed more accurately) my i5-750 /H55M-UD2H with 16GB of ram as a ESXI server.

since i had no supported raid card, I used a shuttle K45 w/ celeron E1200 2GB ram and 2x samsung 1.5TB drives up for network storage (using win2k8 r2 and starwind free edition)

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-free


so everything was kinda super and i thought ....well done now you have redundant storage ...and patted myself on the back

however... now 3mos or so later the shuttle shutdown the other day and wouldn't turn back on :rolleyes: took it apart and discovered that it seems to have bad caps.


I ordered a new motherboard I'm going to put in the shuttle and I'm going to swap the cpu for a E3300 i have laying about.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121358

however i for the moment am dead in the water...since the storage system board failed...


anyways blah blah blah.. what (if any) precautions for this scenario are others using (nas failure)
 
Curious why you decided to go with Windows Server and Starwind for your file storage instead of something like FreeNAS/OpenIndiana. What was your overall experience with it and what sorts of benefits made it worth using over the more traditional approaches?

Here we are using OpenIndiana and ZFS for our stores, mounted over NFS.

On a somewhat related note, I used a K45 as my personal machine for awhile until somehow the CPU or motherboard died. Do you think your CPU was just defective, or do you suspect the K45 mobo/power supply is at fault?
 
That's easy. If you depend on this then you don't build parts and hope for the best. In a prod environment you'd have real gear and a 4-hour contract. ;)

For home...well, it's a lab. What happens, happens. I backup to my second Synology box.
 
CEpeep said:
Curious why you decided to go with Windows Server and Starwind for your file storage instead of something like FreeNAS/OpenIndiana. What was your overall experience with it and what sorts of benefits made it worth using over the more traditional approaches?

Here we are using OpenIndiana and ZFS for our stores, mounted over NFS.

On a somewhat related note, I used a K45 as my personal machine for awhile until somehow the CPU or motherboard died. Do you think your CPU was just defective, or do you suspect the K45 mobo/power supply is at fault?
Click to expand...


hello

so i'm sure it is the mobo (i haven't been able to test the cpu yet..hopefully the board didn't take it with it) because when I took the shuttle apart some of the caps are bulging and one is leaking.

i chose win 2008 r2 / starwinds after screwing about with freenas 8 and finding it to be a PITA (most notably my experiment with simulated drive lost was a absolute disaster...i thought the rebuild process was highly counter intuitive and seems to be a recipe for data loss).

I also tried openfiler and found it kinda nice..but i had trouble with the iSCSI and it didn't include the out of box running from usb stick option of freenas.


since I have a technet subscription i finally said "F*** IT" and installed win2k8 r2 set up the raid 1 and installed starwind and it was buttery smooth and everything "just worked"....well untill the shuttle ate crap that is :)

I was very please with the performance /features of the starwind free product
 
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I have an all in one, but mitigate the risk of the 'one big box' dying by having a backup of my esxi datastore on an esata drive, refreshed periodically. If a critical component dies, I would overnight a replacement. If somehow the raid10 array is pooched, well, that's what the backup is for. Note this is not for a business-critical app, so I'm willing to live with 24 hours or so of downtime.
 
NetJunkie said:
That's easy. If you depend on this then you don't build parts and hope for the best. In a prod environment you'd have real gear and a 4-hour contract. ;)

For home...well, it's a lab. What happens, happens. I backup to my second Synology box.
Click to expand...

touche :)
 
whoa...newegg ftw ordered the replacement mb 3~ish PM yesterday (3day) shipping tracking has it out for delivery today (one advantage of living in SoCal down teh road from city of industry in SD)

have to pay tax...but man if they ship it from the CA warehouse I get stuff with a quickness.

could have already been done with the repairs (hopefully) if i had ordered on Wednesday when the problem started rather than dicking about driving to fry's to discover they really didn't have anything that would work (they had two crappy Zotac 775 boards with realtek lan..blah...and they were both open box anyways... pass.)


in retrospect I wouldn't have used a old 2nd hand shuttle for the NAS functionality :)
 
Did you have any chance to compare StarWind built-in deduplication Vs. something doing ZFS thing? Especially memory footprint using the same deduplication block size.

atarione said:
so.. I recently built (repuposed more accurately) my i5-750 /H55M-UD2H with 16GB of ram as a ESXI server.

since i had no supported raid card, I used a shuttle K45 w/ celeron E1200 2GB ram and 2x samsung 1.5TB drives up for network storage (using win2k8 r2 and starwind free edition)

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-free


so everything was kinda super and i thought ....well done now you have redundant storage ...and patted myself on the back

however... now 3mos or so later the shuttle shutdown the other day and wouldn't turn back on :rolleyes: took it apart and discovered that it seems to have bad caps.


I ordered a new motherboard I'm going to put in the shuttle and I'm going to swap the cpu for a E3300 i have laying about.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121358

however i for the moment am dead in the water...since the storage system board failed...


anyways blah blah blah.. what (if any) precautions for this scenario are others using (nas failure)
Click to expand...
 
I'm not OP but I would not consider buggy FreeNAS and DOA OpenIndiana as a "more traditional approach" :)

CEpeep said:
Curious why you decided to go with Windows Server and Starwind for your file storage instead of something like FreeNAS/OpenIndiana. What was your overall experience with it and what sorts of benefits made it worth using over the more traditional approaches?

Here we are using OpenIndiana and ZFS for our stores, mounted over NFS.

On a somewhat related note, I used a K45 as my personal machine for awhile until somehow the CPU or motherboard died. Do you think your CPU was just defective, or do you suspect the K45 mobo/power supply is at fault?
Click to expand...
 
Use a pair of servers doing RAID1 between their SAN volumes. DataCore, StarWind and Nexenta can do it in Active-Active mode basically doubling single node peformance b/c of use of MPIO. If some component of your server fails rendering whole node useless you can use any COTS hardware to build a replacement node. And re-sync the whole thing up. Yes, you need to go for doubled hardware BUT you don't buy RAID controllers any more and you don't protect hard disks inside single SAN node any more so overhead is moderate.

danswartz said:
I have an all in one, but mitigate the risk of the 'one big box' dying by having a backup of my esxi datastore on an esata drive, refreshed periodically. If a critical component dies, I would overnight a replacement. If somehow the raid10 array is pooched, well, that's what the backup is for. Note this is not for a business-critical app, so I'm willing to live with 24 hours or so of downtime.
Click to expand...
 
so... to whoever asked honestly as far as i got with starwind was just setting up the iSCSI target.. i have not messed about with other functionality yet.


I was happy with the software for what (limited) functionality i have tried out however and found it very easy to set up and use.



sadly my project to repair the NAS has been something of a cluster f*ck so far

i had to try sever different sets of ram to find one that would w/ the new board (DQ45EK) had a issue w/ a bios flash (trying to sort the other issues) at first I thought i bricked it.. happily I managed to get a rescue flash to work...WHEW...cause i generally don't like it when things get to the point of "rescue flashing ..or what have you...)

anyways to add insult to injury ...while the new board is running /stable and the shuttle K45 board is apparently quite dead (tried it with different psu(s) and a different proc... the power supply is also toast...so seeming one took the other with it..DOH... so atm the new board is running with a old antec 400watt atx psu sitting on top of the chassis...


oh and i had to drive to frys to get a god d***ed atx 4 pin extension cable that I apparently don't need now that I'm going to have to swap the psu for another FlexATX psu

(thinging on this one..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817104080

80 plus...so it will pay for itself (in round about 10000000000000 years :) )


anyways good times...



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Olga-SAN said:
Try using OI and recent Nexenta builds to feel the difference.
Click to expand...

is it really that hard to just tell us? i suspect most here aren't going to jump through a bunch of hoops when we have no idea what we are looking for...
 
Olga-SAN said:
Try using OI and recent Nexenta builds to feel the difference.
Click to expand...

I'd be curious to know why Nexenta would be better than OpenIndiana. I tested out Nexentastore Community Edition initially in my all-in-one ESXi server and found the performance to be horrible. I'm currently running OpenIndiana with Napp-it and found the performance much better, but I'm still open to options before I move all my data from my aging WHS server and bring it "live" in ZFS. I haven't upgraded to OI 151 yet, so now would be the time to switch if Nexenta gives that much more in the way of benefits for a home server and ESXi datastore environment.
 
farscapesg1 said:
I'd be curious to know why Nexenta would be better than OpenIndiana. I tested out Nexentastore Community Edition initially in my all-in-one ESXi server and found the performance to be horrible. I'm currently running OpenIndiana with Napp-it and found the performance much better, but I'm still open to options before I move all my data from my aging WHS server and bring it "live" in ZFS. I haven't upgraded to OI 151 yet, so now would be the time to switch if Nexenta gives that much more in the way of benefits for a home server and ESXi datastore environment.
Click to expand...

Nexenta is based on the last OpenSolaris Build 134, while OpenIndiana is based
on the more modern Build 151. Current Nexenta* is end of live. An update to
Nexenta 4 is coming soon. It will be incompatible to current V3 (No update, new install)
and will be based on Illumos just like OpenIndiana.

On a new install, i would not use Nexenta3
 
Nexenta is a complete fork out and not based on. The whole storage stack is maintained by one vendor and it does have the trick done.

_Gea said:
Nexenta is based on the last OpenSolaris Build 134, while OpenIndiana is based
on the more modern Build 151. Current Nexenta* is end of live. An update to
Nexenta 4 is coming soon. It will be incompatible to current V3 (No update, new install)
and will be based on Illumos just like OpenIndiana.

On a new install, i would not use Nexenta3
Click to expand...
 
With Nexenta whole storage stack (and that's what we buy with ZFS) is coming from one vendor resulting turn around cycle for issues being comparably small and acceptable. For OI everything is fine until it starts to break. Then you're on your own - all you can do is to wait for next update.

danswartz said:
is it really that hard to just tell us? i suspect most here aren't going to jump through a bunch of hoops when we have no idea what we are looking for...
Click to expand...
 
MacOS X is also fork out from BSD and completely incompatible with FreeBSD. So what? Does it make FreeBSD better then it? Probably not. I don't know... It does matter how much resources are put into development and it does not matter how really "pure" initial codebase is.

P.S. We're not selling Nexenta and we're not really using anything ZFS based for production as well. FYI.

_Gea said:
Nexenta is based on the last OpenSolaris Build 134, while OpenIndiana is based
on the more modern Build 151. Current Nexenta* is end of live. An update to
Nexenta 4 is coming soon. It will be incompatible to current V3 (No update, new install)
and will be based on Illumos just like OpenIndiana.

On a new install, i would not use Nexenta3
Click to expand...
 
Olga-SAN said:
With Nexenta whole storage stack (and that's what we buy with ZFS) is coming from one vendor resulting turn around cycle for issues being comparably small and acceptable. For OI everything is fine until it starts to break. Then you're on your own - all you can do is to wait for next update.
Click to expand...

how is this different from most linux distros, freebsd, etc?
 
Nexenta has been a joke since Oracle killed OpenSolaris. OpenIndiana is the future. There's not really much else to say.

danswartz said:
how is this different from most linux distros, freebsd, etc?
Click to expand...

BSD isn't like that, it's a Linux thing. With BSD, the entire base system is maintained/curated together with the kernel. It's only with GNU/Linux that has the toolchain and other parts of the base system maintained seperately from the kernel.

Nexenta is a fusion of both the now-dead OpenSolaris and the GNU toolchain. The next version will be built on Illumos, but it has yet to materialize. OpenIndiana on the other hand is a System V-compatible OS built on Illumos that directly follows in the footsteps of OpenSolaris. Illumos is the open-source Solaris kernel forked by Oracle engineers.
 
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Well okay, not as up on BSD as you. My point remains though that this isn't something unique to OI.
 
I buy working ZFS and not System-V purity :)

For Nexenta I see what people sitting in Krasnodar (?) do and for OI I don't. We've been waiting for more then 4 months (!!!) for OI to fix broken FCoE handshake thing and it took a weekend for Nexenta team to pinpoint and fix the issue with hanging Adaptec RAID driver.

CEpeep said:
Nexenta has been a joke since Oracle killed OpenSolaris. OpenIndiana is the future. There's not really much else to say.



BSD isn't like that, it's a Linux thing. With BSD, the entire base system is maintained/curated together with the kernel. It's only with GNU/Linux that has the toolchain and other parts of the base system maintained seperately from the kernel.

Nexenta is a fusion of both the now-dead OpenSolaris and the GNU toolchain. The next version will be built on Illumos, but it has yet to materialize. OpenIndiana on the other hand is a System V-compatible OS built on Illumos that directly follows in the footsteps of OpenSolaris. Illumos is the open-source Solaris kernel forked by Oracle engineers.
Click to expand...
 
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