Hi Guys, So I finish up my job on Friday and will be starting up my new one from 15th September. My new role has no infrastructure to support and lots of downtime so I thought I would use the time to learn some new stuff and gain some qualifications. First ones I wanted to hit were my vmware ones. My current estate at work is pretty feature rich so I am spoilt but I loose this at the end of the week. (C7000 running multiple ESX hosts, Vcentre, MSA 2312 SAN with fibre.) So I started thinking about my Lab. Currently have a Microserver so thats the host sorted but wanted to get a SAN up and running to have a further play. I have enough crap lying around to put a box together so I was thinking the following: 4GB / 8GB RAM 1156 / 1155 mobo and cpu 3 x 2TB WD Greens in RAIDz with a 128GB Cache SSD Couple of GB NICS For the OS I was planning to use FreeNAS. Freenas appears to to have lots of documentation and is pretty well supported. Other options include Nexcenter, Openfiler and finally OpenIndiana. I have used OpenIndiana before to do this kind of thing, but it was a real pig. Im fairly competent around the command line but the documentation really was sparse. Nexcenter I have run in to do some testing but nothing longer than a few days. Never have touched Openfiler. LUNS would be presented back to the Host via iSCSI on its own dedicated VLAN. Just to stress there would be nothing production at all on this network. How does this sound to you guys? Any one done anything similar? Any pointers? Regards, Nims
FreeNAS & Nexcenter work well. Starwind has a free windows based iSCSI SAN for a single host. Personally I'd use the spare kit for the host & the microserver for the iSCSI box
Cheers saspro, you think the MicroServer would have enough grunt for it? Currently I have a MS running openindiana with 4 x 3TB Reds and a 100GB SSD in cache presenting storage to our dev ESXi box. While I dont have any figures to back it up I felt that disk access wasnt as fast as expected. Disk based operations took forever! Regards,
Ideally you want to be using multipathing and jumbo frames for iSCSI traffic if you want to get the speeds up. If you're doing any software based RAID on the microserver it may struggle a bit but if you think that most SAN's only run dual core Athlon64's for their CPU then the MS should have enough grunt
