NFS- SAN - FreeBSD

mojo fms fbsdlilly at gmail.com
Mon Jul 20 20:42:13 UTC 2009


You would be better off at least having the SAN on 1gb ethernet or even
better tripple 1gb (on a 100mb switch should be fine but you need failover
for higher avaliability) ethernet for latency and failover reasons with a
hot backup on the network controller.  I dont see why you could not do this,
its just iscsi connection normally so there is not a big issue getting
freebsd to connect to it.  We run 2 of the 16tb powervault which does pretty
well for storage, one runs everything and the other is a replicated offsite
backup.  Performance wise, it really depends on how many servers you have
pulling data from the SAN and how hard the IO works on the current servers.
If you have 100 servers you might push the IO a bit but but it should be
fine if your not serving more than 2Mb/s out to everyone, the servers and
disks are going to cache a fair amount of always used data.

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Grant Peel <gpeel at thenetnow.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am assuming by the lack of response, my question to too long winded, let
> me re-phrase:
>
> What kind of performance might I expect if I load FreeBSD 7.2 on a 24 disk,
> Dell PowerVault when its only mission is to serve as a local area storage
> unit (/home). Obviously, to store all users /home data. Throug an NFS
> connection via fast (100m/b) ethernet. Each connecting server (6) contain
> about 200 domains?
>
> -Grant
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Grant Peel" <gpeel at thenetnow.com>
> To: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Sent: Saturday, July 18, 2009 10:35 AM
> Subject: NFS- SAN - FreeBSD
>
>
>
> Hi all,
>>
>> Up to this point, all of our servers are standalone, i.e. all services and
>> software required are installed on each local server.
>>
>> Apache, Exim, vm-pop3d, Mysql, etc etc.
>>
>> Each local server is connected to the Inet via a VLAN (WAN), to our colo's
>> switch.
>>
>> Each server contains about 300 domains, each domain has its own IP.
>>
>> Each sever is also connected to a VLAN (LAN) via the same (Dell 48 Port
>> managed switch).
>>
>> We have been considering consolidating all users data from each server to
>> a central (local), storage unit.
>>
>> While I do have active nfs's running (for backups etc), on the LAN only, I
>> have never attempted to create 1 mass storage unit.
>>
>> So I suppose the questions are:
>>
>> 1) Is there any specific hardware that anyone might reccommend? I want to
>> stick with FreeBSD as the OS as I am quite comfortable admining it,
>>
>> 2) Would anyone reccomend NOT using FreeBSD? Why?
>>
>> 3) Assuming I am using FreeBSD as the storage systems OS, could NFS simply
>> be used?
>>
>> 4) Considering out whole Inet traffic runs about 2 Mb/s, is there any
>> reason the port to the Storage unit should be more than 100 M/b (would it be
>> imparative to use 1 G/b transfer)?
>>
>> TIA,
>>
>> -Grant
>>
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>>
>
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