New build ZOL 24TB

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Arrogant

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Jan 11, 2014
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Hey guys, I (my girl actually) am finally able to start building our home server after sitting on the hardware for about 2 years. I have an avoton/supermicro combo in a mini iTX size. We will be installing 6 4tb wd red drives and plan on running Zol. Because I have been out of the loop for about 2 are there new things I need to take into account? I also have a few questions in general before starting the build. I will follow up with pictures once we get started sometime next week. Few questions are below.

1. Is ZOL really an option nowdays? Do people still use it? Anythjng better than zol?
2. What distribution is best for zol, I would either like Debian or rhel, or fedora and prefer not to use ubuntu.
3. I need a sata controller card is the ibm m1015 flashed still the best for zfs?
4. Napp it recommended with any of the above distributions, meaning are there any major issues?

Other than that we are ready to get going and looking forward to contributing.
 
rubylaser

rubylaser

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A few questions: What sort of data do you plan to store on this (VMs, documents, photos, movies, tv shows, etc)? Is expansion in the future something you would want to do? How much space are you currently using for your data? What case do you plan to use? Did you purchase ECC RAM? Do you plan to use programs like Plex, Emby, NZBget/SABnzbd, Sonarr, Couchpotato? Do you plan to use a server version with no window manager?

Those will start to allow others to make suggestions.
 
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Arrogant

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rubylaser said:
A few questions: What sort of data do you plan to store on this (VMs, documents, photos, movies, tv shows, etc)? Is expansion in the future something you would want to do? How much space are you currently using for your data? What case do you plan to use? Did you purchase ECC RAM? Do you plan to use programs like Plex, Emby, NZBget/SABnzbd, Sonarr, Couchpotato? Do you plan to use a server version with no window manager?

Those will start to allow others to make suggestions.
Click to expand...
Sure, let me answer your specific questions and give more in depth requirements.

First, ZFS is not 100% required but I figured it was the best so I wanted to try it. I would actually like about 14tb of storage capacity thus the original thought of having 6x4tb hard drives. Data storage will mainly be media including: photos, music, video, etc. However, important document storage is also required, aka tax documents, pay stubs, court documents, etc.

Expansion is tricky because I have not purchased any hard drives yet other than a SSD for the OS. My original thoughts were to build out the OS, etc. with everything I require, and then build the ZFS storage array once I have acquired all the necessary hard drives over the next 6 months ( I was originally planning on running RAIDZ2 array using 6x4tb drives). The reason for this is because I always heard it was hard to expand a ZFS build and you were better off having all the drives up front. However, if there are options that allow me to start with maybe 2x4tb right now, and then expand over the next few months, that would be a much better solution

The case is a Bitfenix Phenom with plenty of room for hard drives. The actual board is a Supermicro A1SAI 2750F-Om . I will be using plex, and plan on running couchpotato, nzbget etc. I also have 16gb of ECC ram installed.


Below are more in depth requirements for the build
1. Really want linux instead of a Sun variant (debian, or Centos preferably)
2. Mainly media server with good data redundancy.
3. Must be able to run plex, twonky, counchpotato, nzbget and other media programs
4. Gui for the OS would be nice for me because I am a finance guy not a technical person, however the other half is very technical and can manage the server if it only has command line.
5. Likely to be expanded in the future to function as some sort of home video monitoring system.
6. I would like it to function as a software development environment for my GF.
 
Patrick

Patrick

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I might also lean for something like FreeNAS (FreeBSD) as you will very easily be able to do ZFS/ monitor from the command line or the WebGUI. You can also run services in FreeBSD Jails.

Then again, since it is free. You might want to try FreeNAS, Ubuntu, CentOS and maybe even Proxmox. Then just pick whatever you feel most comfortable with.
 
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rubylaser

rubylaser

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Arrogant said:
I have really been looking at the below option over the past few days. Any opinion of just going for setup very similar to this? It seems to have everything I wanted really.

Debian, MergerFS, SnapRAID and Docker – The Perfect Home Media Server 2016 – Linuxserver.io
Click to expand...
This is the setup I use for my bulk media (I'm the zackreed.me that IronicBadger mentions in his article). If you want more info, I have a tutorial on my site as well (in my signature).

I've been running SnapRAID for years without issue and mergerfs is very nice with a great developer as well. Docker is a fantastic for containerizing all of your ancillary services.
 
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Arrogant

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Yea, it is really what I think will work best for me. I am slightly concerned with the configuration of mergerfs be fairly involved but I think I can get through it. I am still waiting on a good deal for WD RED 4Tb but in the meantime I will start configuring debian and various applications before even worrying about snapraid and mergerfs.
 
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Continuum

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Arrogant said:
Yea, it is really what I think will work best for me. I am slightly concerned with the configuration of mergerfs be fairly involved but I think I can get through it. I am still waiting on a good deal for WD RED 4Tb but in the meantime I will start configuring debian and various applications before even worrying about snapraid and mergerfs.
Click to expand...
Using @rubylaser's mergerfs tutorials, I set up the mergerfs based union mount for my drives in under 30 minutes. @rubylaser does a great job of outlining the steps to setup mergerfs.
 
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Chuntzu

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Very cool, great article, I may start pushing some of my friends to start using this type of setup vs storage spaces when running low powered setups for large media collections.
 
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canta

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rubylaser said:
This is the setup I use for my bulk media (I'm the zackreed.me that IronicBadger mentions in his article). If you want more info, I have a tutorial on my site as well (in my signature).

I've been running SnapRAID for years without issue and mergerfs is very nice with a great developer as well. Docker is a fantastic for containerizing all of your ancillary services.
Click to expand...
Ha....
You already gave me snapraid+mergerfs poison by reading your blog.
BTW.. Thanks for detail explanation.


Just need testing the build and ready to be used for cold storage.
 
JimPhreak

JimPhreak

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Oct 10, 2013
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Arrogant said:
I have really been looking at the below option over the past few days. Any opinion of just going for setup very similar to this? It seems to have everything I wanted really.

Debian, MergerFS, SnapRAID and Docker – The Perfect Home Media Server 2016 – Linuxserver.io
Click to expand...
Great article. I know @rubylaser has been recommending his setup for some time now and I've been hesitant because I haven't felt it totally fits my needs.

@rubylaser How do I get in contact with TrapExit to discuss the ability of MergeFS to pool multiple NFS mounts together?
 
rubylaser

rubylaser

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JimPhreak said:
Great article. I know @rubylaser has been recommending his setup for some time now and I've been hesitant because I haven't felt it totally fits my needs.

@rubylaser How do I get in contact with TrapExit to discuss the ability of MergeFS to pool multiple NFS mounts together?
Click to expand...
I already did, if you look at the Github issue. I didn't realize this, but mergerfs already provides read priority based on the order of the mounts (the first is preferred over the second). So, if you had your local and remote NFS mounts mounted at /mnt/local_nfs and /mnt/remote_nfs, you would just need an /etc/fstab line like this to pool them both together and have mergerfs perfer the local version first. This would present both of the volumes pooled together (without duplicates) at /storage. I would suggest you mount the pool at the same path you currently are in your Plex container. That way none of your metadata should need to be updated. Again, I haven't tried this, so I would setup a small test in a couple of VMs before you spend a ton of time on this, but conceptually, it should work well.

Code: 
/mnt/local_nfs:/mnt/remote_nfs  /storage  fuse.mergerfs defaults,allow_other,minfreespace=20G,fsname=mergerfsPool  0       0
Here's his email address if you need it trapexit@spawn.link (on his Github page too).
 
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trapexit

trapexit

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Yeah.... if you setup your search, action, and create policies all to `ff` it'll be more predictable and will as it mentions pick up whatevers first found. The order being what you define as the sources. You can't really use globbing because there is no defined order though I believe it sorts it.
 
trapexit

trapexit

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It should be noted that there are some issues with fuse based filesystems (like mergerfs) and NFS. For some it works fine and others not at all. I've yet to be able to find an explicit difference in setup but at some point it'd be good to try NFSv3 vs v4 and different settings to see which cause problems and which don't.
 
rubylaser

rubylaser

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trapexit said:
It should be noted that there are some issues with fuse based filesystems (like mergerfs) and NFS. For some it works fine and others not at all. I've yet to be able to find an explicit difference in setup but at some point it'd be good to try NFSv3 vs v4 and different settings to see which cause problems and which don't.
Click to expand...
Thanks @trapexit. I have never had an issue with mine using NFS 3 or 4 on Ubuntu 14.04.3. I think people that have had issues with NFS are those that are trying to export a mergerfs pool. In this case @JimPhreak is trying to pool two NFS shares with mergerfs, so there shouldn't be an issue.
 
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