D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] Which FreeNas ?

 

On 14/03/15 15:53, Matt Stevenson wrote:
> Gordon found your response enlightening and helpful am grateful. 
> I may consider looking the Linux compatibility layer for FreeBSD. 
> Although would prefer Linux and self configure, as really looking to
> offer SMB and AFP data in an office so was looking at Netatalk on Linux
> for AFP. 
> 
> Found this page highlighting the Linux - FreeBSD differences. 
> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/explaining-bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html
> 
> The Hardware links you supplied me with were excellent too thanks. 
> 
> Matt


Glad to help - if you really want the best of all possible worlds (ha!
Leibniz reference!) then go crazy and build yourself something like this:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1573272

You'll end up with an ESXi hypervisor and virtualized ZFS SAN on a
Solaris derivative: from there you can trivially export your ZFS pools
via AFP, CIFS, NFS and use it for iSCSI/FCoE targets, etc. The ESXi
instance can also use the ZFS SAN as it's datastore for hosting more VMs
for task specific purposes - build a Samba4 Linux host or a Win 2k12r2
VM for AD, install a virtualized OSX server for centralized time machine
backups, an OpenBSD router, etc - all in one little box with full COW
snapshots, rollbacks and automated backup procedures.

This particular howto focuses on building all this on a low cost HP
Microserver but I've already started building versions of this at work
on much bigger hardware - proper HP ProLiants and Dell blades with
masses of cores, RAM and disks and they are by far the coolest and most
versatile systems I have ever had the pleasure of working on. Once
you've got your initial ESXi instance up, everything else lives on the
virtualized ZFS SAN that you then re-export back to ESXi via NFS: build
a few of them and lash the VMWare hypervisors together into a HA cluster
for added fun, and then you can even automate your ZFS send/receive pool
backups between the cluster members.

Here in the UK it can sometimes be tricky to find decent channel
resellers but I've got a bit of a thing for SuperMicro Fat Twin blade
systems - the newest ones have NVME support so you don't have to go
through the pain of reflashing your RAID card into IT mode: just hook up
a bunch of fast disk and install a load of PCIe-attached flash for your
ZFS ZIL/ARC caches and away you go.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/FatTwin.cfm

Not the cheapest, but you can stick an insane amount of power into a
very small space these days.

Cheers

PS: Don't use AFP for talking to Macs unless absolutely unavoidable -
even Apple are deprecating it now and recent OSX release perform
considerably better via CIFS or even NFS. AFP blows, and always has done!

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq