RECOMMENDATIONS FreeNAS 10

[krzykat]

Has anyone checked out FreeNAS 10? It's built on Unix - FreeBSD and uses ZFS for the ultimate in speed and reliability/redundancy. With the new 10 version having so much better support for VM's and Docker, it seems like the sky's the limit for what can be done with this.

Realize it takes some serious horsepower to get in the game, but it seems like it could be worth it. I recently purchased a dual cpu quad core zeon supermicro with 48 GB ECC and 12 bays for a great price. I have added 6 3-TB WD-Reds to get me started on this.

The original idea (still main idea) is to have crashplan on it so that I can back up all my household computers, and also a couple clients' servers. Then I'm thinking to have all CDR's and and audio recordings stored on it as well, not to mention PIAF backups. But since its got the VM's now and Docker, maybe I'll try to put an instance or two of PIAF on there as well.

Anyhow - just installed today and looking for time to test it out.

 

[dicko]

FreeNAS was my choice for many years, if however you compare even the latest and greatest Beta to ProxMox 4, then ProxMox is

1) Not Beta
2) Supports ZFS natively
3) Has KVM (qemu) and LXC containers bulit in
4) Tight integration with glusterfs, iscsi etc. for replication and HA
5) Is actually Debian 8 (Jessie)
6) Provides storage to suite anything
7) Uses Corosync well for your "clever things" ,so . . ..


I would suggest you explore ZFS better ,

1) it is not a be all and end all
2) well deployed it is solid,
3) Never use hardware RAID with it,
4) watch it closely as it can run wild
5) Back it up

In your case, I would buy another machine "just like the other one", cluster them with glusterfs for storage over ZFS , it's all in the ProxMox FM.
Then everything, Windoze included, will very happily run HA and be failure resistant


JM2CWAE

 

[krzykat]

Wow - thanks for the input. I'm running another box with Prox 3.2 with just one drive on it, and am quite happy with it. So much, that I haven't even looked at further product advancements. I'm even running probably a dozen PBX's on it, so it sounds like I need to go back to research with latest prox. What do you mean by: watch it closely it can run wild, and back it up? Those 2 statements scare me a bit.

 

[dicko]

Don't get me wrong, ZFS is good, but IF you want to "tune" the zpools and volumes there are a lot of tunables, some will not help ;-) . By trial and error I have learned a lot and self inflicted a few FUs, they did NOT help , so you need to trim the whole concept to what you want, for example, you won't need a ZIL for voip servers, I suggest that you use simple mirrors (stripes). Depending on your HD's use them in striped pairs, for the base OS use the native zfs . Then for HA then add glusterfs/iscsi on top of the storage for your machines and Proxmox' clustering abilities, also for reliability , I suggest you add a third "quorum" machine which doesn't have to be much at all, a single 40G disk on an a 64bit atom or NUC is fine. For disks 3+ I set them as replicated glusterfs over zfs on raw disk stripes. Great for backups, cloning etc. the ability to move a machine live between nodes within seconds is calming, the stress of relying on a Single Point of Failure being no longer there, more so. I always add a similar HA Kamailio machine on each node and use that for inbound/outbound call routing, but that's because I can and have BGP and gluster's georeplication to another cluster is also a convenience. Have a cron job that emails you your zpool status regularly and have spare drives sitting around.

Have a plan to recover from a "penetrated" server in timely fashion, spend as much time on firewalling your "other services" than SIP as most recent 'vectors' get into your systems by such methods, especially recently with some implimentations of FreePBX.

 

[chris_c_]

Wow - thanks for the input. I'm running another box with Prox 3.2 with just one drive on it, and am quite happy with it. So much, that I haven't even looked at further product advancements. I'm even running probably a dozen PBX's on it, so it sounds like I need to go back to research with latest prox. What do you mean by: watch it closely it can run wild, and back it up? Those 2 statements scare me a bit.

Proxmox 4 on debian jessie 8 is a great upgrade from proxmox 3 on debian 7. However, beware, you cannot simply upgrade the OS then upgrade the proxmox package. It is a simultaneous upgrade of the underlying operating system (debian 7 wheezy to 8 jessie), upgrade of the proxmox package, and migration conversion of the virtual machines from openvz containers to LXC containers, as openvz is no longer maintained in dedian 8. Read and follow the upgrade doc meticulously.. Basically, you need to first vzdump the containers to backups as tar.gz. Then, upgrade to OS to debian 8, then upgrade the proxmox packages, then restore the openvz containers and convert them to LXC format.

 

[dicko]

To avail yourself of ZFS as the boot device and best use it for storage you will need to reinstall, upgrading is likely a waste of time as you will be stuck with the legacy lamenesses of ext4/xfs . I'm personally not sure that containers are a "good idea" for VOIP servers (nor of course your windoze boxen) , however any QEMU machine images backed up in 3.2 will seamlessly be usable on your shiny new 4 cluster, easy steps if you do it slowly and carefully on Sunday morning but I suggest you need two hosts and a modicum of network skills to route calls seamlessly to the 'new' machines when appropriate, the bonus is that the old machine can be reinvented and added to the new cluster with little down time for your extant PBI.

 

[krzykat]

At this point, I don't plan to use containers for VoIP, as I think there are too many potential problems with it. After doing some further research, I feel like I want to create a new Prox4 and then migrate the VM's from Prox3 to Prox4. The initial intent of the FreeNAS was backups and OwnCloud, and I think I'll probably use that server still for that (but yes on FreeNAS 9, as 10 is still just BETA). I do however plan to play with iSCSI on it as that sounds like fun.

 

[dicko]

Good for you but iscsi is quite a pain to set up and arrange properly, I suggest you start with gluster, it's mostly "painless" and will provide everything you need. As I said, backups/snapshots/migration is all inbuilt, why redesign a lumpy wheel?

 

[chris_c_]

Applications like OwnCloud and backups work great in LXC containers, because they leave the dedicated resources for the VOIP machines.