NFS- SAN - FreeBSD

[Grant Peel]

Thanks for the reply.

I have not used/investigated the iSCSI thing yet....

The original question is can I just use an NFS mount to the storage's /home partition?

-Grant
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: mojo fms 
  To: Grant Peel 
  Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org 
  Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 4:21 PM
  Subject: Re: NFS- SAN - FreeBSD


  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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