Can I / Should I attach 14tb of freenas raidz2 storage as iscsi?

[newdamage1]

I'm looking for ideas on the best way to add this storage. Here's the story:

Home lab components:
SM MBD-X10SL7-F-O
1230V3
32Gb ram
6x 4Tb NAS drives
256Gb SSD, MLC

Current configuration thought:
ESXi 5.5 pass-through the (IT mode'ed) LSI to freenas 9.x attaching the 6x4tb drives as raidz2. From there, iscsi that zvol to Win2012R2VM as a single volume to be formatted ntfs. This volume is for media/general/backups storage only, no vmdk's.

I have read about folks providing that storage to esxi itself via NFS, but that seems like too many layers for my needs. And I would like to eventually ( next tax return ) move the box physically to freenas which should be fairly seamless.

However, I am asking mostly for options that I have not thought of. Suggestions appreciated!

 

[corge]

I have two different storage arrays, 16TB total on each box, attached through two NICs on each box (both 1gb) through LACP using iSCSI. This works like a champ and I have had no issues at all.

Once you get to the command line menu in FreeNAS, tell it you want to create a bond and it will take both network cards and create a new one called bond0. This will have the IP address you assigned it now.

 

[newdamage1]

I have two different storage arrays, 16TB total on each box, attached through two NICs on each box (both 1gb) through LACP using iSCSI. This works like a champ and I have had no issues at all.

Once you get to the command line menu in FreeNAS, tell it you want to create a bond and it will take both network cards and create a new one called bond0. This will have the IP address you assigned it now.

This is interesting, let me make sure I understand what you have setup. You have 2 hypervisors, both with freenas vms's, and then the storage from each is iscsi'ed to the other hypervisor?

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I played with iSCSI when I first installed FreeNAS, and found that at least on my setup, the performance was not quite there.

From what I can tell, people seem to recommend NFS over iSCSI for most applications.

 

[TCM2]

Why store files on an NTFS on iSCSI on ZFS? And you complain about too many layers?

Why not export some storage from that ZFS via SMB?

 

[newdamage1]

Why store files on an NTFS on iSCSI on ZFS? And you complain about too many layers?

Why not export some storage from that ZFS via SMB?

Your right, it's to many layers. once I did a test build, it got scrapped in a hurry. I ended up just building ESXi on the hardware and passing through the onboard lsi to freenas and sharing the media out as cifs (via dfs links from one of the Windows guests.)

I did for giggles create a few iscsi extents and provisioned them as datastores for guest os'es to test vmotion out. The speed on those was not the greatest. I'll try few NFS shares and see if that's any better.

thanks for the advice!

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

SMB is pretty good, but I have found NFS to provide much more consistent transfer speeds.

You can enable NFS in Windows relatively easily.

Security is done on an IP address level though, not based on username and password. Some may not like this.

 

[Ruffy]

SMB is pretty good, but I have found NFS to provide much more consistent transfer speeds.

You can enable NFS in Windows relatively easily.

Security is done on an IP address level though, not based on username and password. Some may not like this.

on windows 8, native NFS has been taken out (Only available in enterprise edition.
You can get it back with third party tools, but I rather not bother.

 

[Nate7311]

NFS shares via Windows can be a mess to manage. I agree with TCM2 about exporting a share via SMB for simplicity. The bigger question, if you plan on adding a vmfs store to the FreeNAS vm, is how will you divide up the capacity. iSCSI presents the entire dataset or file extent to the connecting OS as raw storage to be formatted by the connecting OS. NFS and SMB(CIFS) are sharing protocols that share out storage capacity on an existing volume on the NAS. Short version, is if you'll probably want to plan out your storage needs and organization otherwise, you'll be doing a TON of re-architecting and/or moving data before you're settled.