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tayfundeger · 5 years ago

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New Post has been published on VMware Virtualization Blog

New Post has been published on https://www.tayfundeger.com/freenas-nedir.html

FreeNAS Nedir?

Merhaba,

FreeNAS Nedir? isimli bu yazımda sizlere homelab ortamında kullanabileceğiniz hem de opensource bir storage ürünü olan FreeNAS hakkında bilgi vereceğim. Öncelikle şunu söylemem gerekiyor ki ben de ilk başlarda FreeNAS’ı aşağıdaki ortamda kullandım.

VMware Home Lab

FreeNAS Nedir?

Makaleme başlamadan önce TrueNAS ve FreeNAS ‘dan bahsetmek istiyorum. FreeNAS’ın ismi yakın bir zamanda değişti ve TrueNAS Core ismini aldı. Tabiki FreeNAS ile aynı özelliklere sahip ancak FreeNAS’e ekstra olarak yeni özelliklerde içinde barındıracaktır. Bu konu ile iligli duyuruyu aşağıda görebilirsiniz.

https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/freenas-truenas-unification/

FreeNAS ilerleyen günlerde ismini değiştirecek ve TrueNAS Core ismini alacak. Ancak şuanda TrueNAS Core production ortamlarında kullanımda değil. Kısa süre içerisinde production ortamlarında kullanmaya başlayacağız.

FreeNAS Nedir?

Ben makaleme FreeNAS Nedir ile başlayacağım ancak bu isim yakın bir zamanda değişecek.

FreeNAS Nedir?

FreeNAS kesinlikle kullanmanız gereken opensource bir storage yazılımıdır. Hatta zaman geçtikçe aslında bir storage markası olmaya kadar ilerlemiştir. Freenas ilk olarak 2005 yılında Olivier Cochard-Labbé tarafından kendi file storage ihtiyacın karşılamak amacı ile yapılmıştır. FreeNAS o dönemde yapılırken, FreeBSD üzerinde geliştirilmiştir. Hatta FreeNAS ismide aslında buradan esinlenmiştir. O dönemlerde bu şekilde bir ürün çok çok fazla olmadığı için bu projeyi duyanlar hemen bu projeye ilgi gösterir ve FreeNAS ile ilgili bir canlı topluluk oluştu. Böylece FreeNAS gereçek bir ürün olarak şekillenmeye başladı. File Storage ihtiyacını karşılamak için oluşturulan ürün kısa bir zaman içerisinde, file sharing, media streaming özellikleride eklendi.

2010 yılından itibaren Cochard-Labbé, FreeNAS projesini devam ettirmek için artık yeterli zaman ve kaynak sağlayamadı, bu yüzden kontrolünü genel olarak open source diye tabir ettiğimiz açık kaynak yazılım desteği ve FreeBSD desteği ile tanınan bir şirket olan iXsystems’a verdi. Bunu, büyüyen bir FreeNAS geliştirme topluluğunun ihtiyaçlarını karşılamak için yazılımın güncellenmesi ve modernizasyonu ve proje altyapısının geliştirilmesini içeren önemli bir geliştirme çabası dönemi izledi. iXsystems geçtiğimiz günlerde

Kullanıcı arayüzü tamamen yeniden yapıldı ve ZFS pool‘lar için disk şifreleme ve kernel’de olmayan hizmetlerin kurulumunu destekleyen bir 3 party eklenti sistemi gibi özellikler eklendi. Bugün, FreeNAS, her sürüm için yüz binlerce indirme ile çok aktif bir geliştirme aşamasındadır – kuruluşundan bu yana toplamda 5,5 milyondan fazla indirme olmuştur.

Yazımın başından buraya kadar okudğunuzda FreeNAS sayesinde bir opensource storage oluşturabildiğini anlamış olmanız gerekiyor 🙂 FreeNAS ile evet storage ihtiyaçlarınızı çözebiliyorsunuz ancak iXsystems sadece FreeNAS’ı bize sunmuyor. FreeNAS, home ve SMB gibi ortamlarda tercih edilirken daha büyük ortamlarda kullanılmak üzere çıkarmış olduğu ürünlerde bulunmaktadır. Örneğin TrueNAS isimli ürünü ile kritik BT ortamında bulunan ihtiyaçlarınız karşılayabilirsiniz. TrueNAS kurumsal düzeyde bir depolama yani storage’dır. TrueNAS sayesinde, failover, performans ayarları, raporlama ve hem donanım hemde yazlım seviyesinde 7/24 destek ve bakım alabilirsiniz. Ancak yazımın başında da belirttiğim gibi FreeNAS’ın ismi artık TrueNAS Core olarak değişecektir. Ancak enterprise müşteriler için TrueNAS yine kullanılmaya devam edecek.

Ben bu yazımda FreeNAS Nedir? hakkında bilgi vereceğim, TrueNAS’ı ayrı bir makalede anlatırım eğer merak eden olursa 🙂 FreeNAS’ı aslında FreeNAS yapan yani başarılı bir opensource storage haline getiren ZFS ‘dir. ZFS diye burada bahsettiğim aslında dosya sistemidir.

FreeNAS’ın temel özelliği ZFS’dir (veya “Zettabyte” File System). Başlangıçta Sun Microsystems tarafından geliştirilen ZFS , büyük depolama kapasitesi ve silent data corruption, volume management ve RAID 5 “write hole” gibi birçok depolama sorununu ele almak için tasarlanmıştır.

ZFS’nin yazma üzerine kopyalama teknolojisi, çok etkileyicidir çünkü bu teknolojiden dolayı performans alınmaktadır.. Veriler diske yazılana kadar data block’lar güncellenmediğinden, tipik RAID write hole sorunu ZFS için geçerli değildir. ZFS ayrıca, snapshot alındığı sırada mevcut olan dosyaların bir parçası olan blokların silinmesini önleyerek çalışan bir snapshot özelliğini de destekler. Bu bloklar daha sonra değişmediği sürece, snapshot’ı korumak için neredeyse hiç alan kullanmaz. ZFS deduplication’a benzer bir şekilde çalışır ve hangi bloklarda hangi blokların kullanıldığı tabloları korur.

FreeNAS o kadar güzel bir ürün ki, grafik ara yüzünde nested olan ZFS dataset’lerinin yönetimini sağlayabilirsini ve bunu destekler. ZFS dataset’lerinde, her dataset için compression ve data deduplication’ı yapılandırabilirsiniz. Yani bu işlemleri dataset bağımsız yapabilirsiniz. Bunların zaten örneklerini ayrıca yazacağım. Ancak FreeNAS genel olarak sizin tüm ihtiyaçlarınıza cevap verebilecek düzeydedir. Örneğin ZFS dataset’leri üzerinde snapshot alabilir ve bunları zamanlayabilirsiniz.

FreeNAS sürümleri ile birlikte sürekli yeni özellikler gelmektedir ancak ben genel olarak FreeNAS’ın özelliklerinden kısaca bahsetmek istiyorum.

Yönetim arayüzü özellikleri;

Web tabanlı grafik arayüzü ve isteğe göre SSL encryption

Ortalama 20 adet dil desteği

Web, Console ve SSH erişiminin ayarlanması

Grafik performans raporu

S.M.A.R.T. disk diagnostics

Local sertifika yönetimi ve kendi içine bulunan Certificate Authority role.

Download edilebilir konfigurasyon dosyası

2 factor authentication desteği

Web-based graphical user interface with optional SSL encryption

Alarm desteği ve bunun özelleştirilebilmesi. Yani siz isterseniz bunu email ile raporlayabilirsiniz.

Dosya Sistemi Özellikleri:

Feature Flags (OpenZFS v5000) ve 16 Exabyte’lık teorik depolama sınırına sahip son derece esnek ZFS dosya sistemi. ZFS dosya sistemi özellikleri tamamen yapılandırılabilir.

Compression (lz4 ve gzip dahil),

Tam volume şifreleme (GELI ve AESNI hardware acceleration destekli disk encryption),

Snapshot

Data Deduplication

Kullanıcı kotaları

Fiziksel diskler tamamen taşınabilirdir ve veri kaybı olmadan diğer FreeNAS sunucularına veya OpenZFS’nin uyumlu bir sürümünü destekleyen herhangi bir İşletim Sistemine taşınabilir. Bu oldukça önemli bir özellik. Sadece buradan bence ayrı bir makale konusu çıkar.

Veri güvenilirliği yani Data reliability özellikleri – mirroring / RAID (ZFS RaidZ dahil), güvenilirlik için seçilen verilerin ve meta verilerin birden fazla kopyası ve gerektiğinde tüm sistem sağlama ve arka plan veri onarımı (scrubbing)

Server Güvenilirlik Özellikleri:

Replication ve Failover

Multi version boot – boot menüsü, FreeNAS’ın versiyonunu güncellediğinizde ve güncel versiyonda bir sorun yaşadığınızda tekrar eski versiyonunuza kolay bir şekilde dönebilirsiniz.

UFS2, NTFS, FAT32 ve EXT2 / 3 için disk read ve data import

Kullanıcı / Grup izinleri – Klasik Unix / Linux izinleri ve / veya ACL tabanlı (Microsoft dosya sistemleri için ACL’ler dahil)

Network hizmetleri ve özellikleri

Samba / SMB / CIFS (Microsoft ve diğer ağlar için), AFP (Apple), NFS, iSCSI, FTP / TFTP protokol destekleri

LDAP ve Active Directory desteği

Apple Time Machine ve Microsoft File History desteği

rsync data sync ve replikasyonu (sunucu / client)

Link aggregation ve failover

VLAN

Dynamic DNS Client

Remote syslogd yönlendirme

SNMP izleme

Bakır kablo, fiberoptik kablo, WiFi dahil FreeBSD tarafından desteklenen çok çeşitli ağ donanımı ve ortamları

UPS (Kesintisiz güç kaynağı) desteği

GUI tabanlı yönetim

iozon, netperf, OpenVPN, tmux ve diğer yardımcı programlar

FreeBSD depolarından 20.000’den fazla paket ve bağlantı noktası mevcut ve kurulabilir.

FreeNAS ‘ı peki hangi ortamlarda kullanabilirsiniz? Storage yatırımı yapmak istemiyorsanız ve ileri seviye ZFS ve Linux bilginiz var ise FreeNAS’ı kullanabilirsiniz. Özellikle VMware ortamlarında vSphere HA ve vSphere DRS gibi teknolojileri kullanmak istiyorsanız shared bir datastore’unuzun olması gerekir. Shared Datastore ihtiyaçlarınız isterseniz VSAN ile isterseniz External bir Storage ile isterseniz de fiziksel bir sunucu üzerinde diskleri ekledikten sonra FeeNAS ürününü kurup bir storage haline geetirebilirsiniz. Üstelik FreeNAS üzerinde hem ISCSI hemde Fibre Channel protokollerini kullanabilirsiniz.

https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/openzfs-keeps-your-data-safe

FreeNAS peki güvenilir mi? Buna şöyle cevap vermek istiyorum. FreeNAS’ın sağlamlığı aslında ZFS’den geliyor. ZFS çok sağlam bir dosya sisteim olduğu için FreeNAS’ı güvenli kılıyor. Yazımın başında da belirtitğim gibi FreeNAS’ın gelişmiş bir topluluğu bulunmaktadır. Burada sorularınızı sorailir ve hızlı bir şekilde cevap alabilirsiniz. Eğer isterseniz ücreti olarak support’da alabilirsiniz.

https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-commercial-support/

Özellikle storage yatımı yapmak istemeyen kişilerin, firmaların hatta hosting firmalarının kullanması gereken bir ürün olduğunu düşünüyorum. VDS Satışı, VPS satışı, Cloud sunucu sataın hosting firmaları için ideal olduğunu düşünüyorum. Değerlendirmenizde fayda var 🙂

Kurulum gereksinimleri oldukça düşük ancak merak edenler aşağıdaki linki inceleyebilir. Zaten kurulum bölümünde ayrıca bunu anlatacağım. FreeNAS Nedir? isimli makalemi burada sonlandırıyorum.

https://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/

Umarım faydalı olmuştur.

İyi çalışmalar.

#açık kaynak kodlu #freenas esxi #freenas test #freenas vmware #freenas zfs #opensource storage #sanal freenas #truenas vs freenas

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grmmorg · 3 years ago

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Unraid free memory

Thanks to Unraid you can bid for that drive without having to consider the cost of additional drives. Or you might be lucky enough to find a hard drive in a good condition on the second-hand market. Deals on hard drives pop up frequently and by using Unraid you can buy a single drive and immediately increase your raw storage capacity. How can this save you money? By simply allowing you to purchase drives when you want or need to. Open the case and rearrange the drives, cables, and most importantly the ports on the motherboard, PCI-e, or PCI card to which they are attached. You’ve almost certainly read it a million times before but here I go again for the million and oneth time: Unraid’s biggest advantage over RAID-based systems is that you can mix and match hard drives of different sizes. System 1: MB: Asus Prime X399-A Memory: 128GB Corsair Ballistix BLS16G4D26BFSE CPU: AMD Threadripper 1950X PCIe: Geforce 1070ti - Intel Dual Port 10G NIC Other: ZFS, A bunch of HDD System 2: Lenovo P700 Memory: 96GB ECC CPU: Dual Xeon E5-2620 v3 2. After server has shut down, unplug your unRAID server (or flip the power switch on the power supply). Unraid lets you buy whatever hard drives you want But I do not foresee the initial setup of Unraid becoming more complicated even if that were the case. There are ways of using ZFS on Unraid and there is a possibility of an official implementation making an appearance in the future. That’s not to say that you cannot make Unraid more time-intensive if you wanted to. Sure, you can debate with which filesystem to go with, but apart from that everything is taken care off. Unraid, on the other hand, doesn’t give you many options to choose from. For complete novices just deciding which RAID level to go with will take up multiple hours as that decision can’t easily be reversed, and you will likely be stuck with whatever you first choose. What this means for the user is that other, RAID-based operating systems, take up far more time and nerves to set up and maintain. Although certain aspects of its setup are sure to have changed in the last years, the basics of TrueNAS CORE, namely the ZFS filesystem and RAID-Z, are objectively more complicated than Unraid. That is despite having worked in IT for a number of years. Getting started with TrueNAS CORE wasn’t easy. When I say invested it is meant in both a monetarily and time sense. Unraid is a time-saver (and time is money)īefore switching to Unraid, I was heavily invested in TrueNAS CORE (or FreeNAS as it was called at the time). Unraid saves you power and replacements.Unraid lets you buy whatever hard drives you want.Unraid is a time-saver (and time is money).

#Unraid free memory

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taka8aru · 5 years ago

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Ansible NASはFreeNASをUbuntu上で実現したNASサーバソフト、zfsも使える

https://github.com/davestephens/ansible-nas

Why I Ditched FreeNAS And Replaced It With Ubuntu Server And Ansible · David Stephens 2017-10-05 https://davidstephens.uk/ansible/linux/ubuntu/2017/10/05/why-i-ditched-freenas-replaced-with-ubuntu-ansible/

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digital-dynasty · 5 years ago

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TrueNAS 12 schluckt FreeNAS und bringt native ZFS-Verschlüsselung

TrueNAS 12 ist da und stellt das Systeme auf neue Beine, auch wenn die Linux-Variante noch fehlt. Für die Nutzer ist vor allem die ZFS-Basis eine Umstellung. Read more www.heise.de/news/…... www.digital-dynasty.net/de/teamblogs/…

http://www.digital-dynasty.net/de/teamblogs/truenas-12-schluckt-freenas-und-bringt-native-zfs-verschlusselung

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mobilwecom · 5 years ago

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تنزيل FreeNAS (2020 الأحدث) لنظام التشغيل Windows 10 و 8 و 7

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FreeNAS هو نظام تشغيل يمكن تثبيته فعليًا على أي نظام أساسي للأجهزة لمشاركة البيانات عبر الشبكة. التطبيق هو أبسط طريقة لإنشاء مكان مركزي ويمكن الوصول إليه بسهولة لبياناتك. استعمال FreeNAS مع ZFS لحماية وتخزين و النسخ الاحتياطي لجميع البيانات الخاصة بك. يتم استخدامه في كل مكان ، للمنزل والشركات الصغيرة والمؤسسة.ZFS هو نظام ملفات مفتوح المصدر جاهز للمؤسسات ، ووحدة تحكم RAID ، ومدير وحدة…

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#FreeNAS #Windows #الأحدث #التشغيل #تنزيل #لنظام

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lichocpu · 5 years ago

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TrueNAS Core will soon replace FreeNAS—and we test the beta - ZFS features—with no command-line management. / https://ift.tt/2CS2Pk0 , 2020-07-20T12:02:04.000Z

#IFTTT #Facebook #Sharing #2020-07-20T12:02:04.000Z #Luis Ernesto Black Martínez #ZFS features—with

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ladystylestores · 5 years ago

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TrueNAS Core will soon replace FreeNAS—and we test the beta

Earlier this week, network-storage vendor iXsystems announced the release of TrueNAS 12.0-BETA1, which will replace FreeNAS later in 2020. The major offering of the new TrueNAS Core—like FreeNAS before it—is a simplified, graphically managed way to expose the features and benefits of the ZFS filesystem to end users. In the most basic environments, this might amount to little more than a Web front-end to ZFS itself, along with the Samba open-source implementation of Microsoft’s SMB network file-sharing protocol.

Although this might be sufficient for the majority of users, it only scratches the surface of what TrueNAS Core is capable of. For instance, more advanced storage users may choose to share files via NFS or iSCSI in addition to or in place of SMB. Additional services can be installed via plug-ins utilizing FreeBSD’s jail (containerization) facility, and the system can even run guest operating systems by way of FreeBSD’s BHyve virtualization system—all managed via Web interface alone.

TrueNAS Core will be what FreeNAS is now—the free, community version of iXsystems’ NAS (Network Attached Storage) distribution. End users—and system administrators who aren’t looking for paid support—can download FreeNAS or TrueNAS Core ISOs directly from iX, burn them to a bootable optical disc or thumbdrive, and install them on generic x86 hardware like any other operating system.

We’ve been kicking the tires on early versions of TrueNAS Core since its announcement in March, and we see no evidence of any FreeNAS functionality slipping away behind “premium only” paywalls. The dividing lines between TrueNAS Core and TrueNAS Enterprise are no different than those between earlier versions of FreeNAS and TrueNAS itself.

Due to the sheer breadth of TrueNAS Core’s offerings, we can’t walk you through everything it’s capable of in a single article. But we will hit the major highlights along the way—we’ll install the distribution and set up a storage pool on eight physical disks, join TrueNAS Core to a Windows Active Directory domain, set up some file shares, and play with ZFS snapshot and replication facilities.

The user interface has come a very long way in the six years since our 2014 review of FreeNAS. The modern TrueNAS interface has been entirely rebuilt from scratch, along much more coherent lines. If you’ve tried and given up on old versions of FreeNAS, it’s worth taking a second look at how far it has come.

Installation

If these options seem overwhelming, installing and managing your own storage distribution may not be for you.

Jim Salter

Once you’ve decided to install, the next question is where you want the root and boot filesystem to go.

Jim Salter

This wasn’t our first TrueNAS Core test run, so we’re given the option to upgrade or install fresh. We chose the fresh install.

Jim Salter

FORMAT! EVERYTHING!

Jim Salter

Last chance to abort! It’s a little odd that we’re not told about the preference for “flash media” until the “oh no” screen, but okay.

Jim Salter

You’ll need to set a root password before rebooting. There is no strength check here; if you want to use “poop” as your password, the installer won’t complain.

Jim Salter

TrueNAS supports either UEFI or BIOS boot. Both modes worked on our Linux KVM virtual machine, and directly on the metal of the Storage Hot Rod.

Jim Salter

That’s the whole install—pop the install medium out of the system and reboot.

Jim Salter

The first-boot phase of a TrueNAS Core installation is the simplest OS installation we’ve ever seen. TrueNAS Core doesn’t ask you to do the complicated stuff during the original installation; all it wants to do is slap the operating system onto a boot disk and have done with it. You pick a disk (or USB thumb drive) to act as the boot-and-root medium, set a password, and pick UEFI- or BIOS-style boot—that’s it.

All of the interesting stuff—like configuring the rest of your disks as actual storage devices or creating and exposing network shares for them—happens later.

First boot

This ASCII splash screen hangs around for five seconds; if it hasn’t received input by then it falls through to a standard boot.

Jim Salter

The only thing most users will need to do at the text console is configure the network interface (which defaults to DHCP).

Jim Salter

You might think you’d WANT to “remove the current settings of this interface”—but if you do, it just returns you to the menu. So, uh, don’t?

Jim Salter

Don’t forget to configure your default route (and DNS) as well as the IP address, if you leave DHCP mode.

Jim Salter

There isn’t much to do on your first reboot after installing TrueNAS Core—little or no configuration is ever done at the physical machine. By default, the system will assign configurations to any live network interfaces by DHCP. If you don’t want to issue a specific DHCP reservation for the TrueNAS system at your router, you’ll need to manually set an IP address in the text-based menu here.

Once you’ve got your TrueNAS Core system living at its “forever IP address,” it’s time to walk away, sit down in front of the computer or mobile device of your choice, and browse to the TrueNAS Web interface to get the real configuration work done.

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winkeltriple · 5 years ago

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This was a project which has been a while in the making. For a long time, I’ve had 2 extra computers sitting under my desk (Top Left Photo). One had a nice GPU, and was my previous main PC (with a couple of VMs on it in hyper-V), the other was a machine I used/abused for playing around with different linux distros.

On the other side of the room was an old, sad Dell Workstation with 4GB of ram, and ~18TB of disks (with a beefy PSU and an extra Sata Controller). It was running windows server essentials, and hosting some fileshares off one disk, with a monthly powershell script for updating the other disks from the master copy. It was hot and loud, and slow and not terribly reliable. I’m terrified of losing my precious data. So it’s been retired, and it’s disks have been recovered (Middle Left Photo).

My old main PC gave up its fancy GPU, its solid state storage and windows partitions to become my new Proxmox host. It has a single 500GB disk in it (Top Right Photo). It gained a Hotswap bay, in case it needs easy access to additional storage. It also went from 16GB of ram to 48GB. Proxmox mounts an NFS share from one of the Freenas pools, where the VMs and containers live.

The micro case which was the linux distro testbed was converted into a slick Freenas host (Middle Right Photo for the hardware, Bottom Right for the software dashboard). The case didn’t have enough real drive bays, So I got creative. The 6TB disks are snug as bugs, but one of the 3T drives is hanging out, attached to the side panel.

The hardware for freenas is as follows (If the SSDs had matched sizes, I would have been able to build a single, massive pool):

An old i5 CPU is fast enough

24GB of DDR3 for a fast ZFS cache

My cheap sata controller card was automatically recognized (It’s not some fancy LSI, it’s just a $30 adaptec)

A little 120GB SSD for freenas to live on

Each pool has a large 500-1000GB SSD for cache, on the faster Sata3 ports

Each pool has 2 same-size drives mirrored for storage

The pool using my 6TB drives has no spare, the 3TB pool has a spare

Once the combination was stable, it moved to the garage, where The noise of all that spinning rust isn’t a problem (Hitachi Enterprise Drives can be heard from about 30 feet). It’s a big win for the air conditioning to not be fighting against 2 always-on computers, to boot. I backed up my important data (about 1TB) to S3 Glacier, just to be completely secure. I haven’t lost substantial data since 1997, and I plan to keep it that way!

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symlinks · 6 years ago

Link

Chin-Fah Heoh

#Storage Gaga #feedbin.me

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lelecalo · 6 years ago

Link

Nice write-up of the ZFS vs non-ECC RAM old (& wrong) discussion

#zfs #bsd #linux #ecc #freenas

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guyrobottv · 8 years ago

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The Annual NAS Challenge

For some reason I like to build large storage arrays. I do tend to eat up a lot of storage and over time I’ve filled them up. For the last couple of years I’ve gone big and in 2016 I decided to just buy an off the shelf Drobo 5N filled with 5x 4TB SATA drives. It’s fine but there have been a few issues with it – the lack of active directory integration means I cannot securely use it to store virtual machine disk images for Hyper V Server and a lack of iSCSI and slightly lack-lustre out the box NFS implementation has left me with the same problem for VMWare ESXi virtual machines. I’ve ended up just using it to store all my old backups and ISOs but don’t feel I’m getting the most out of it.

I had some old parts sat around that I shared on Facebook a while ago – motherboards, CPUs, RAM and a lot of disks. Amongst them were 4x 4TB matched SAS drives and a SAS HBA I had used on a project a couple of years ago. At that time I was working on a NAS that I never quite felt happy with and then personal issues meant I had to leave it in an undesired state. Most of it got torn down but a few bits remained so this year is mostly a rebuild of a NAS from the past but with a clear intention on stability and performance – at least matching my Drobo 5N when it comes to network speed.

The last NAS had a number of issues:

Trying to get everything in to a 2U case proved extremely loud and messy

Consumer grade hardware posed issues with OpenIndiana, switched to FreeBSD

iSCSI stability issues – regularly lag spikes

Speed never ended up particularly high

Significant management overhead just to keep it running

I did however really enjoy working with ZFS and found iSCSI worked wonderfully for my virtualization needs. With a focus on backing virtual machines for my projects and learning from this build in the past this year’s requirements are:

iSCSI protocol

SMB with Active Directory integration

At least 100MBps sustained speed for an iSCSI read or write operation

Potential for link aggregation

ZFS implementation

Rapidly upgradeable NAS operating system

Low management overhead

Needs to look good and remain quiet on my desk as this won’t be in a data centre or rack mounted in my garage

A Virtual Solution

To meet my requirements the first thing I decided on way to go with an out-of-the-box FreeNAS installation. It handles iSCSI and ZFS but prevents me needing to look and manage everything under the hood if I don’t want to. It also comes with pretty good (apart from web authentication) integration with Active Directory which means it will be easy for me to setup and manage for iSCSI and SMB without installing a tonne of extra software. Having played with FreeNAS 9 and the beta of 10 during testing I decided to stick with the latest stable release of FreeNAS 9. I had a bunch of issues with the web interface and even the boot loader on FreeNAS 10. Whilst I think 10 is a landmark shift away from the issues I’ve always had with previous versions of FreeNAS it’s definitely not there for daily use yet.

The next big decision was how to manage upgrades. Knowing the issues I had testing FreeNAS what I didn’t want was to make a decision to upgrade FreeNAS at some point, or switch to another ZFS-based operating system, and end up with my NAS and consequentially virtual machines unavailable for a whole week. The solution – virtualising my NAS and using a bare metal hypervisor as the actual underlying operating system on the hardware.

Running FreeNAS in a virtual machine works and is supported but there are a few caveats – the main being that any disk which FreeNAS itself is sharing out needs to be as close to the physical hardware as possible. Creating a physical RAID array, having the RAID adapter setup in the hypervisor and then creating several disks for ZFS to be configured on in a FreeNAS virtual machine is the worst possible thing you can do. All the optimisations that ZFS does are negated but underlying technologies and it becomes a worst-of-all scenario.

I decided to go with VMWare ESXi 6.5 as my hypervisor. I’ve used 5.5 a lot and wanted to try the new version. I did consider Hyper V Server 2016 and gave it some testing but found a few limitations that frustrated me and decided (other than my desktop PC) I would stick to VMWare across all my virtualisations.

Using ESXI 6.5 left me with a simple solution. The 4TB SAS disks that will form my storage array are connected to a HBA which can, in turn, be directly passed through to the virtual machine. This makes my LSI SAS2008 card appear to FreeNAS as if it is installed locally. Because the card is where the disks are connected to VMWare never even sees the 4TB disks. The HBA itself is one I used a couple of years ago and blogged about at the time to make sure it just presents disks and does not RAID on top of them (note even JBOD). Passing through the HBA required enabling IOMMU in the motherboard and selecting the device in VMWare as a pass-through device. The mother board also has eSATA ports that I passed through even though I am not using them at this point.

For the FreeNAS boot disks I use SSDs. Unfortunately, I cannot pass these through and nor is there any underlying RAID on them. To give me some stability here I have two separate SSDs. I have created a virtual disk on each of these which are then configured in a ZFS mirror for the FreeNAS boot drive. Whilst this is not as ideal as having them directly passed through to VMWare it does mean that I have a mirror for protection against single drive failure and performance on them will be more than adequate to boot with. I also didn’t want to pass these through as I’d then lose some of the advantage of hot-swapping the underlying operating system unless I kept adding disks.

This virtualised solution means that I can configure FreeNAS with 16GB of RAM and 6 cores which will be fine for my daily use and then create a second VM with everything other than the PCI Express pass-through enabled. I can then get everything working and ready for migration. If I want to then switch to a different underlying operating system for my NAS I just shut down the initial VM, attach the PCI Express HBA to the new VM, start it up and import the ZFS volumes – this entire process will take a couple of minutes and can be dry-run through first. I am sacrificing some RAM here to FreeNAS but for my use case I think the versatility is better.

To complete this built I’m going to be using the hardware I have listed here. This includes a 6-core processor, 32GB RAM, an Intel quad gigabit NIC, a GTX 460 graphics card and most importantly an Aerocool DS200 case in fluorescent orange. I’d love to say I selected the case for the number of disk bays and noise dampening that it provides but the truth of it is I loved just how orange it is. I did a separate review of the case recently – it isn’t amazing but it is orange and works well for my purposes.

The Build

The build is detailed in full in the video at the top of this post and there will also be separate videos coming up showing how I configured FreeNAS and ESXi to enable this configure in full. Rather than rehashing everything here it all went pretty well though apart from a few issues that did crop up.

I started by almost bricking my SAS HBA. When swapping from a low-profile to full-sized bracket I got annoyed at a screw, removed its thread and almost snapped the PCB whilst trying to remove it. Thankfully everything still worked. Don’t get mad at your HBAs folks, it rarely ends well. There were a few issues with cable management – namely how little space this case provides behind the motherboard tray – and the graphics card makes more noisy than I’d like (but it does have an orange fan), however the physical build was fine other than these minor issues.

During the install of ESXI 6.5 I had a bunch of issues that I’d not encountered before. The first was with keyboards – a selection of modern gaming keyboards I had would not work once ESXi’s installer booted at all. I ended up using a late 1990s Sun Microsystems vintage keyboard I had lying around which seemed fine. I guess this is the first time I’ve tried ESXi with a consumer keyboard (rather than a basic Dell one in a rack) and didn’t spend much time investigating but something to look out for – no BIOS setting changes got anything working here.

The other really annoying thing with ESXi was its desire to not play ball with a USB-stick installation. One of the reasons I had selected ESXi over Hyper-V was so that I could install it on a USB stick. Many USB sticks were just not detected by the installer or would not partition – even one that I’d got ESXi 5.5 installed on. I eventually got it working on a USB stick I didn’t really want to use (it was a small collapsible one prone to falling out of machines) when eventually it started giving random errors during reboots. At this point I gave in and went with just using a small amount of SSD space on one of the datastore drives. I never got to the bottom of this, some of the drives could be fakes but I doubt all of them are – it’s more likely an issue between the consumer board and ESXi. I was able to work around this using SSD but never addressed the underlying issue. If you have this and must install on a USB stick my recommendation would be install ESXi as a VM in Windows (through VMWare Player) and then take that disk image and burn it to a USB stick (this also works for Hyper-V).

The final issue was the motherboard’s on-board Realtek network interface. The RTL8110 is no longer supported by VMware in ESXi 6.5. Whilst I had a separate Intel quad gigabit NIC (which worked perfectly) I wanted to use the Realtek one for management traffic and reserve the Intel card for iSCSI. To work around this you can install the other drivers from VMWare 5. This does work but is not supported. You can either merge these in to your ESXi 6.5 image before you start or do it via the other working cards afterwards (which is what I did).

To get your Realtek card working with ESXi 6.5 follow these steps:

Download the drivers from http://vibsdepot.v-front.de/depot/RTL/net55-r8168/net55-r8168-8.039.01-napi.x86_64.vib and upload to your datastore (we’ll refer to its name a DatastoreName below)

Enable SSH on the host

SSH in as root to the host

Type in the following two commands:

esxicli software acceptance set -level=CommunitySupported

esxcli software vib install /vmfs/volumes/DatastoreName/net55-r8168-8.039.01-napi.x86_64.vib

Reboot your host

This should all work magically – but a couple of caveats:

The first time I did this my Realtek NIC appeared but I lost the Intel ports. I never could get them back. They were detected and had a driver loaded but never mapped to an interface and no errors in any logs. A reinstallation worked fine.

Some people have repeated other odd errors – including the card running for months, freezing up and then working fine after a reboot. I wouldn’t use this port for anything production-worthy.

And with that the 2017 16TB NAS is ready for action.

Performance

I tested numerous configurations with both iSCSI and SMB. I ran drive configurations including two-parity disk RAIDZ2 (ZFS’ version of RAID 6), single-parity disk RAIDZ (ZFS’ version of RAID 5) and mirrored stripe and just striped configurations (ZFS’ versions of RAID 10 and RAID 0). I ran all these tests with the default synchronous write policy and compression disabled. I separately ran some compression tests and found a very small fluctuation in speeds with anything up to default levels of gzip compression (highest gzip did drop around 10MBps of transfer). I also ran tests to see if ZIL disks or additional RAM would significantly change performance figures – they didn’t.

From the main results it became obvious really early on that iSCSI out performed SMB but it had some odd issues including speeds peaking and then dropping significantly before peaking again. I was able to get 102.32MBps out of my tests (which did beat the Drobo 5N) but I wasn’t happy with the lag spikes – these can be fatal when you want low-latency for virtual machines.

I then did something many people would consider bad – I swapped to an asynchronous write policy. This definitely increases risk in your storage solution (a sudden power loss and I’ve potentially corrupted the disks far more than I otherwise would) and I would not recommend it in production unless you can take other precautions (keeping replicas, backups, and a stable UPS with graceful ZFS shutdown would be musts). That being said, I am not in a production system and the results smoothed out and gave me a big performance boost.

Switching as async writes with RAID Z over iSCSI gave me a whopping 125MBps – completely maxing out the gigabit Ethernet. Whilst I haven’t tested the impact of link aggregation yet I did do a test from another VM within the same host (in effect removing the NICs limitations). This was able to pull down more than 250MBps (2.5Gbps over the network) – and that was sat on top of a virtual disk in a datastore on top of the iSCSI itself.

I’m really happy with this NAS – it looks great, it’s quiet and I can happily get a 26% performance increase over my off-the-shelf Drobo 5N with a lot more versatility. Whilst these parts could cost a lot if purchased new everything other than disks could easily beat the price of a Drobo 5N if purchased second hand and there’s scope for many more disks and configurations here plus a fairly low power drag (I notice around 100W at the moment).

I’ll be doing some posts on the ESXi and FreeNAS configurations that I’ve used shortly but for now enjoy the video above which includes all the benchmarks and shows off the build a little more.

cof

mde

sdr

With a new year comes a new NAS - check out my 2017 16TB build. Did I mention... it's orange? The Annual NAS Challenge For some reason I like to build large storage arrays. I do tend to eat up a lot of storage and over time I’ve filled them up.

#esxi #freenas #iscsi #nas #raid #san #zfs

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