Virtualization, EUC, and Computing in General
Let me preface this post with 2 things: It’s going to be short and sweet It assumes you’re using NFS for your datastores (which you should be – since writes are SYNC, the snapshot should be clean) First, you need somewhere to move the backing files – in my case, I take a tiered storage approach. VMs run on several spindles of 10K SAS; CIFS storage is on a few 2TB SATA drives; offsite is … Read more…
I see a lot of posts on the FreeNAS forums asking about performance for VMware\Hyper-V or any other hypervisor using FreeNAS as the backing storage for virtual machines. Then I see the specs of the systems those people are looking to build or already have built and I frown a bit. First, let me say that FreeNAS is more than capable of handling the task of storage for your home virtual lab – if you … Read more…
The Proliant G6 line of servers are quiet – and that’s big for anyone using server grade hardware at home (me). I had started with G5 servers, but those were pretty loud – especially the DL380 – per the HP quickspecs document, 44dB. Then I upgraded everything to G6 servers and it made a HUGE difference – sort of. The ESX host is a DL360 – nothing special here, just an extra NIC. The G6 … Read more…
Last Friday, 9/6/2013, StarWind released a beta of version 8 of their core SAN product – iSCSI SAN. This version has been in the works for several months – it includes what appears to be a major rewrite of the core storage code as well as a simplified management console. The core includes: All previous beta features are now supported and standard – RAM cache, dedupe, etc LSFS – log-structured file system – groups random … Read more…
I recently upgraded to FreeNAS 9.1 once it was GA. I have always used compression on the volume that stores all of the virtual machines – instead of using DeDupe which requires considerably more RAM, and doesn’t appear to be as forgiving. That being said, the volume has been configured with LZJB compression and I was seeing about 40-50% compression ratios. Then I converted the volume to LZ4 compression. *Note: Modifying compression only effects new … Read more…
The StarTech HSB430SATBK is a great drive cage – it fits into 3 5.25″ external bays and gives you 3 3.5″ SATA hot-swap HDD bays. Unfortunately, fans going bad is not uncommon. Here’s a quick how to if you ever need to replace the fans on the StarTech 4 bay HDD cage. First remove all the screws from the back plate – don’t remove the screws from the fans – they are screwed into the … Read more…
This post is slightly out of order – I’ll do part 2 with all specs, hardware, and pictures shortly. For now here’s some brief preliminary findings – the configuration: 4 mirrors of 2 x 146GB SFF 10K RPM drives ZIL housed on 1 mirror of 2 Intel 330 60GB SSD drives DL380G6 with 30GB PC3-10600R RAM ESX is connected to this via NFS (I know sync writes…that’s why the ZIL is on the SSDs). So … Read more…
FreeNAS Build: Part 1 – Turn on a Power Supply without a Motherboard After doing much research, I’ve decided to move forward with my FreeNAS build for my home lab\storage. I will be storing VMware datastores via NFS and tons of files via CIFS. The system will be configured (for now) as follows: HP DL360G5 2x Dual-Core Xeon 3.0GHz 32GB RAM 4 1Gb NICs IBM ServeRAID M1015 flashed to an LSI-92118i HP SAS Expander Habey ESC-2122C for 12 … Read more…
I’ve been testing FreeNAS lately – connecting ESX hosts via NFS for virtual machine storage. Being POSIX compliant, ZFS must abide by any calls made with the o_sync flag set meaning essentially that all disk activity must be written to stable storage before success is returned. This includes most commonly databases, file server operations and most importantly NFS. This means that the ZIL (ZFS intent log) will be used as a special place on disk in the pool … Read more…
I have been testing lots of storage software lately – since a NetApp Filer is overkill for a home lab environment, I’m sticking with other software based storage. The goal has always been to serve storage for two things – Fast storage for an ESX cluster and lots of storage to share over the network with CIFS. The first iteration was a DL380G5 with a p800 card connected via external SAS to an MSA50. The … Read more…