Re: [LUG] First plunge into ZFS/FreeNAS

On 17 April 2017 at 21:42, M. J. Everitt via list <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 17/04/17 21:32, Daniel Robinson via list wrote:

Hello folks,

Just wondering if somebody would be so kind as to tell me my RAID options for my current hardware setup.

I haveÂ 2x identical 1TB and 2x identical 500GB stuffed inside a newly acquired HP N40L microserver.

In am looking for redundancy and don't require more than 1TB of total storage at this present time.

I will be using FreeNAS unless anyone wants to point me back in the direction of Linux/Debian.

My guess is I'll need two RAID 1. 2x1tb=1tb 2x500gb=500gb total storage of 1.5TB. However, I am very new to ZFS and I might be looking at this as though it was the year 2004. (not played with RAID since around that time).

Any pointers please?

Dan

I did this for my former employer. but using FreeNAS and ZFS you don't really 'use' RAID in the same way.... (ZFS 'architecture' should make this apparent :) )

I found if you follow the FreeNAS docs (read, read and read again -sigh-) I had it up and running in under an hour.

NB. The web interface can be a bit of a pain, and it doesn't always 'match up' with the underlying OS (we had huge problems getting SSH authentication right) because the web-GUI stores all its values in a database, and pushes changes back to the underlying OS, *not* the reverse!!!

What I also did with the Microserver:
- Add more RAM .. ZFS needs it (apparently) so I doubled it to 4GB IIRC (it was a N56 box)
- Add a second NIC .. you can then bond them together (if yours doesn't have it already) to give you a 2GB link
- FreeNAS runs on a USB stick (there's a handy slot /inside/ !) .. since the NAS drives have to be independent of the OS

Hopefully this should set you off in the right direction, but if you need any more help, don't hesitate to drop me a further message on/off list as appropriate!

Good luck, BR,

Michael.
PS. I was chatting with the Gentoo guys at FOSDEM (as Gentoo is my host OS) and they said that ZFS-on-Linux was coming along, and works well for them in production environments. I haven't yet bitten the bullet (in the same vein I haven't tackled LUKS yet either!) so I can't vouch for their experience personally!

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