Hi, I need some guidances for putting together a storage unit to serve 2 - 3 ESXi via iSCSI and act as a large store via NFS.
Knew next to nothing about storage and been researching a lot for the past few weeks. Here're the requirements ....
1) Pretty much sure it has to be ZFS based because I want the native checksum, raidz, scalability, compression, etc. Don't think BRRFS is production ready, and will be here to stay.
2) Good enough to run the servers via iSCSI mounts so I wouldn't get issues with ESXi or timeouts, etc but doesn't have to handles huge IOPS. Think if we use this forum's traffic as a benchmark we are good.
3) Majority of the space will be for the NFS, shared across the VMs.
4) Want to have Active Active HA via Cluster in a Box (ie 2 nodes in a 1U units).
5) Start with 8 x 4TB in raidz2 in a 24 bay 2U JBOD and grow.
Looked at the following:
Nexanta
- Too expensive because they charge per storage space unit.
Eon NAS
- Doubtful on their performance because like most of these pre built devices they have a puny amount of RAM available (32GB for their high end units).
FreeNAS
- Don't like the fact there is no ability to do global hot spare.
TrueNAS
- Ridiculous money they are charging.
Napp-It
- First time I looked I wasn't able to find much English pages. Second time I looked I found some but not sure how widely it's deployed and tested.
ZFS on Linux
- Read it's production now but some features available to the Solaris and FreeBSD variants are still not available or Linux? And think I read some ran into issues with it as well?
My background:
- Extremely familiar with Linux via CLI but not so much with Solaris or FreeBSD.
- No experience building servers myself so I wouldn't know things like whether it is possible to plug in hard drives in advance and power them up via IPMI. Need to do some more research on this but if someone knows, please let me know. Also I wouldn't know I should buy Dell or Super Micro. What are the pros and cons?
If there is anyone who had built a scalable storage for servers and can give me some steer, comments, etc, it's much appreciated.
Knew next to nothing about storage and been researching a lot for the past few weeks. Here're the requirements ....
1) Pretty much sure it has to be ZFS based because I want the native checksum, raidz, scalability, compression, etc. Don't think BRRFS is production ready, and will be here to stay.
2) Good enough to run the servers via iSCSI mounts so I wouldn't get issues with ESXi or timeouts, etc but doesn't have to handles huge IOPS. Think if we use this forum's traffic as a benchmark we are good.
3) Majority of the space will be for the NFS, shared across the VMs.
4) Want to have Active Active HA via Cluster in a Box (ie 2 nodes in a 1U units).
5) Start with 8 x 4TB in raidz2 in a 24 bay 2U JBOD and grow.
Looked at the following:
Nexanta
- Too expensive because they charge per storage space unit.
Eon NAS
- Doubtful on their performance because like most of these pre built devices they have a puny amount of RAM available (32GB for their high end units).
FreeNAS
- Don't like the fact there is no ability to do global hot spare.
TrueNAS
- Ridiculous money they are charging.
Napp-It
- First time I looked I wasn't able to find much English pages. Second time I looked I found some but not sure how widely it's deployed and tested.
ZFS on Linux
- Read it's production now but some features available to the Solaris and FreeBSD variants are still not available or Linux? And think I read some ran into issues with it as well?
My background:
- Extremely familiar with Linux via CLI but not so much with Solaris or FreeBSD.
- No experience building servers myself so I wouldn't know things like whether it is possible to plug in hard drives in advance and power them up via IPMI. Need to do some more research on this but if someone knows, please let me know. Also I wouldn't know I should buy Dell or Super Micro. What are the pros and cons?
If there is anyone who had built a scalable storage for servers and can give me some steer, comments, etc, it's much appreciated.