2011-09-30, 18:38
I've been struggling with questions of rebuilding my media server. I was previously using WHS v1 w/ DriveExtender, which obviously is not a viable option going forward.
After going back and forth between different options I eventually settled on 2k8 with FlexRaid and FlexRaid-View for drive 'pooling' so everything is presented in single directories. The system is a centurion variant case with 15x 5.25" bays, and currently has 2 of the "5-in-3" HDD trays with about 10TB of available storage right now on 5 drives (nearly filled). This is working great for my setup and I really don't have any reason to change it. I can add drives as I go and they are protected with a single Parity drive. Even if parity breaks for some reason the failure of a single drive only loses data on that drive.
However, I'm considering building a new "nas" device with a fuller featureset. I also have an VMWare ESX 4.1 server currently with local storage (8x15k SAS drives) that I would prefer to get on shared storage so I can add a second box for clustering.
For this reason, I'm looking at options for a single NAS for my whole house that would serve 3 purposes
1) Fileserver for media
2) Datastore for VMWare cluster (probably either iSCSI or NFS)
3) Potentially using it for higher-performance storage on my desktop (photoshop/lightroom)
Options I was looking at were
-FreeNAS w/ ZFS - I did some testing in my lab and there were some serious show-stopping bugs with the software that made me uncomfortable. It wouldn't even acknowledge a failed drive until i rebooted the system, and similarly wouldn't see a replacement without a reboot. It wouldn't send out email notifications about either one. It appears the GUI is very basic and anything you really need to get done requires the shell. I'd prefer to avoid using cron jobs and custom scripts to perform what I consider required tasks
-OpenFiler - Has the featureset I want, including NFS and iSCSI, but it's basically dead at this point and doesn't have much development going forward. It also looks like I'd have to create additional arrays to augment capacity instead of growing an existing array like (I think) I could do with ZFS.
-UnRaid - don't really see advantages of this over the other options, especially if I want to create a higher-performance tiered storage for photo editing
I would not be running any media related daemons on the NAS itself, and would probably offload those to a VM for downloads, etc.
Any thoughts? Probably would get a norco 20-24drive case and start with ~8-10 2TB+ HDDs. I would also probably put in my 15k SAS drives for a higher performance storage tier
Really just kind of lost with a lot of potential options and want to know if anyone here has faced similar questions...
*Edit* damn that was long - Cliff notes: what platform should I use for Media fileserv + vmware datastore + mapped windows volume for photo editing?
After going back and forth between different options I eventually settled on 2k8 with FlexRaid and FlexRaid-View for drive 'pooling' so everything is presented in single directories. The system is a centurion variant case with 15x 5.25" bays, and currently has 2 of the "5-in-3" HDD trays with about 10TB of available storage right now on 5 drives (nearly filled). This is working great for my setup and I really don't have any reason to change it. I can add drives as I go and they are protected with a single Parity drive. Even if parity breaks for some reason the failure of a single drive only loses data on that drive.
However, I'm considering building a new "nas" device with a fuller featureset. I also have an VMWare ESX 4.1 server currently with local storage (8x15k SAS drives) that I would prefer to get on shared storage so I can add a second box for clustering.
For this reason, I'm looking at options for a single NAS for my whole house that would serve 3 purposes
1) Fileserver for media
2) Datastore for VMWare cluster (probably either iSCSI or NFS)
3) Potentially using it for higher-performance storage on my desktop (photoshop/lightroom)
Options I was looking at were
-FreeNAS w/ ZFS - I did some testing in my lab and there were some serious show-stopping bugs with the software that made me uncomfortable. It wouldn't even acknowledge a failed drive until i rebooted the system, and similarly wouldn't see a replacement without a reboot. It wouldn't send out email notifications about either one. It appears the GUI is very basic and anything you really need to get done requires the shell. I'd prefer to avoid using cron jobs and custom scripts to perform what I consider required tasks
-OpenFiler - Has the featureset I want, including NFS and iSCSI, but it's basically dead at this point and doesn't have much development going forward. It also looks like I'd have to create additional arrays to augment capacity instead of growing an existing array like (I think) I could do with ZFS.
-UnRaid - don't really see advantages of this over the other options, especially if I want to create a higher-performance tiered storage for photo editing
I would not be running any media related daemons on the NAS itself, and would probably offload those to a VM for downloads, etc.
Any thoughts? Probably would get a norco 20-24drive case and start with ~8-10 2TB+ HDDs. I would also probably put in my 15k SAS drives for a higher performance storage tier
Really just kind of lost with a lot of potential options and want to know if anyone here has faced similar questions...
*Edit* damn that was long - Cliff notes: what platform should I use for Media fileserv + vmware datastore + mapped windows volume for photo editing?
