Home Setup - Design changes

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marcoi

Well-Known Member
Apr 6, 2013
1,532
288
83
Gotha Florida
So I made some updates to my home lab in regards to FreeNAS. I was getting system crashing of sorts which i think was due to too much going on at the same time. IE Sunday am, scrubs and vm backups hitting same time might been causing something to die on FreeNas which caused all my VM using FreeNas to hang.

So i broke out FreeNas into two VMs. One for data/backup and the other for VM storage. Each VM now has one HBA. Data/Backup FN has external HBA to access the SM case with 24 hdd and the VM storage FN has access to internal HBA which is attached to 8 bay sas3 2.5 which has my 8x800GB SSD.

FreeNas - Data/Backup VM
CPU - 8
Ram - 32GB
I redid my storage pools as well. Went from two z1 pools to two z10 pools.
Each pool has 4 x 8tb drives in mirror/strip and one 30 or 60GB slog based on 100GB HUSSL4010BSS600 SSD attached to ESXI host as passed in as a hdd. Each storage pool has it's own 100 GB SSD attached.
upload_2019-3-21_12-50-9.png

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Each pool has one zvol setup with iscsi, also they setup on their own IP/Nic so i dont run into bottle necks with transfers.
IE data on 0.121 and backup on 1.121 ip addresses.

Each pool also has a data store which is shared out to ESXI hosts vis NFS. These shares are setup in esxi as datastores I use for storing offline VMs and doing backups of current prod/dev vms.

All pools have sync = always.

FreeNas - Storage VM
CPU - 4
Ram - 32GB
Storage pool is the same as before. Most optimized for VM storage. Also the slog is optane 900. The optane is no longer shared between two FreeNas VMs so it only job is for usage as a slog for this pool. The pools are attached to ESXI hosts via ISCSI on 1 port but with two IP/NICs.
upload_2019-3-21_12-59-0.png


So far the changes have been great. Data/Backup FN now runs a lot better. It can easily do 150-260MB/s writes to either pools. the 100GB HUSSL4010BSS600 SSD seem plenty fast for my use case. Data/Backup are drives assigned to my Windows 2012R2 essentials server for content storage and backups.

So far the Storage FN is also running well. And not that its split up from the data/backup if one goes down the other stays up.

Overall i think the split up of functions makes sense. I see a future version of my storage continuing this trend of multiple FN VMs for various functions. When I get some money to purchase some other equipment. I want to get a new MB with 6-10 PCI slots and set it up for running ESXI host and 2-3 FreeNas VM. Each with 32-64GB Ram, it's own HBA, optane drive and possibly it's own nic. But that for future plans.
 
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TeleFragger

Active Member
Oct 26, 2016
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Seems like a slick setup. I dropped out of using freenas as my 10gb network was not being utilized. It would tank my freenas box down to 3mb/s copies but to win server 2019 i get 1.03gb/s