NFS- SAN - FreeBSD
Grant Peel
gpeel at thenetnow.com
Wed Jul 22 00:01:16 UTC 2009
Chris,
Thanks for the insight!
I will defineately investigate that DAS ... although I am not (yet) sure
what the acronym means, I am sure it is something akin to "Direct Access
SCSI".
You are quite right, I would like to use NFS to connect the device to the 6
servers I have, again, it would be only hosting the /home partition for each
of them. Do you know if there would be any NFS I/O slowdowns using it in
that fassion? Would freebsd support (on the storage device) that many
connections?
Also, do the Dell DAS machines run with FreeBSD?
Also, from you you explained, I doubt I really need the versatility of the
SAN at this point, or in the near future. I simply want a mass /home storage
unit.
-Grant
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher J. Umina" <chris.umina at studsvikscandpower.com>
To: "Grant Peel" <gpeel at thenetnow.com>
Cc: <questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 5:43 PM
Subject: Re: NFS- SAN - FreeBSD
> Grant,
>
> I mean to say that often times external SCSI solutions (direct attached)
> are cheaper and perform better (in terms of I/O) than iSCSI SANs.
> Especially if you're using many disks. SANs are generally chosen for the
> ability to be split into LUNs for different servers. Think of it as a
> disk which you can partition and serve out to servers on a per-partition
> basis, over Ethernet. That's essentially what an iSCSI SAN does. While
> DAS systems allow the same sort of configuration, they don't serve out
> over Ethernet, only SCSI/SAS.
>
> Since you plan to use NFS to share the files to the other servers, I think
> it may make more sense for you to use a SCSI solution if yo don't need the
> versatility of a SAN.
>
> Of course I know nothing of how you plan to expand this system, but from
> what I understand, with Dell DAS hardware it is possible to connect up to
> 4 different servers to the DAS and expand to up to 6 15 disk enclosures.
> The MD3000i (iSCSI) expands only to 3.
>
> Another issue is that without compiling in special versions of the iSCSI
> initiator, even in 8.0-BETA2 (which is not production-ready), iSCSI
> performance and reliability are terrible. There are other versions of the
> code (which I currently use) for the iscsi_initiator kernel module, but
> unless you're comfortable doing that, you may consider DAS in terms of
> ease of implementation and maintenance as well.
>
> Chris
>
> Grant Peel wrote:
>> Chris,
>>
>> I don't know what a direct attached array is.....
>>
>> What I was just thinking was move all of the servers /home directory to a
>> huge NFS mount.
>>
>> If you have the time to elaborate fursther, I would apprciate it...
>>
>> This iSCSI think has me entrigued, but I must admit I know little about
>> it at this point.
>>
>> -Grant
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher J. Umina"
>> <chris.umina at studsvik.com>
>> To: "Grant Peel" <gpeel at thenetnow.com>
>> Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 11:27 PM
>> Subject: Re: NFS- SAN - FreeBSD
>>
>>
>>> Grant,
>>>
>>> I have to ask, is there a reason you're intent on going with a SAN
>>> versus a direct-attached array?
>>>
>>> Chris
>>>
>>> Grant Peel wrote:
>>>> 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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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> -- Who knew
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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