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Avoid openfiler like a plaque.
Its either freenas or softNas
I personally use softnas due to certain features.
All my webservers run on RamDrives using vMotion in case of failure. Works like a charm.
https://www.softnas.com/wp/
I read on many forum, it stated freenas need more RAM then openfiler, and also they got some problems when it's connected to esxi thru isci. Is it true ?
yes. But i think with ESX 4. I have no problems with SoftNas and ESX5.1
ok, I will try it.
take a look at nas4free too
nas4free is a fork of the old freenas v7 and has lower ram requirements than newer freenas releases. Though freenas has more features than nas4free, I've yet to need any of them.
I've used nas4free with esxi 4.1 with no issues. have started using it with esxi 5, but haven't used it enough to comment on stability yet.
http://nexenta.com/corp/nexentastor-download
There you go!
Freenas is pretty good, but does use lots of memory in the latest releases. I haven't tried nas4free, but it does sound like it's not as memory intensive. I haven't used Nexenta in a couple of years, but it was not bad back in 2009 era.
Nas4free has upnp and bittorrent client, it looks like synology nas.
I had tried freenas on my box with 2 GB, it was very slow
.
If compare to openfiler, needs of ram is bigger.
The iscsi configuration more complex then openfiler, but if I go to nas feature, freenas is better.
Yes, 2gb isn't enough memory for FreeNAS anymore. The machine I have in production has 16gb of memory/dual 5420's and is used exclusively for NFS shares at the moment. With FreeNAS 8, I had memory free usually, but now(9) it sticks in the 14gb used range after an hour or so of usage, and stays there. Deduplication seems to be one thing that caused the memory to be hungry - I haven't used iscsi with FreeNAS in a very long time, but it does seem more fine grained than openfiler was in 2008-09.
Wow, I should provide a big memory
. May I know what is the function of deduplication ?
Openmediavault owns.
I like the iscsi in Nextenstor and it uses ZFS. But it eats up a lot of ram (for ZFS cache, unless you use some SSD's for cashing) But it is fast and the iscsi implementation is very stable.
Probably a bigger learning curve with nextentastor but for production I prefer it.
How big for ram ?
I am not sure how little you can go. I think I had it running with a few gigs in the past and it ran fine. Now I use 32GB of cheap ram in order to do caching. Worth looking into if you want a really rock solid iscsi implementation.
how about write and read speed ?
I installed freenas 8 in an atom with 4 GB of ram and 8 GB flash card and ran ZFS with no issues over NFS and iSCSI (same time). However, that was nowhere near serving storage for virtualization nodes, only for exporting some backup space. It was as responsive it could be over 1 gbps network. Had to scrap it eventually over a debian plain box, even tho I liked a lot the ZFS, I also needed to do some other things, but when it was running was decent enough considering the hardware.
I will try to install it on xeon 3,2 and with ram 2 GB, the old HP Server ML 150 G3. will see the performance. Can we install upnp also ?
2 GB is little unless you have hardware raid because ZFS will not work and caching will be minimal, imo you need 4 GB for a decent freenas 8.
How many cores of proc for minimun ?
Load was low on my atom with ZFS, but if you have high traffic with ZFS (1 gbps sustained both directions) I suppose a simple Atom 2 cores might not be enough, but will come close. If you are doing FC one way or the other, you need much more. But it also depends on drives capacity of storing and delivering the data, I was using it with 4x2 TB green drives which are not particularly fast, so the CPU was not a problem.
For industrial NAS which needs to deliver tens of gbps every second via FC, iSCSI and NFS in parallel, at least some E3 would be needed. Perhaps even E5.
Proc cores are not as important as the RAM here, but would say one Xeon or i3/i7 should handle lots of work. I run FreeNAS on a single proc core vm, and also on an 8 core Xeon, but would say the single core runs fine. Also, as someone stated before, you will see better performance overall if you decide to use ZIL cache with SSD disks for your array. And finally, the Wikipedia answer to what is deduplication: In computing, data deduplication is a specialized data compression technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data.
My example: if you have a couple of virtual machines called A and B on this storage array, ZFS/dedup should notice that their is an exact copy of a file in server A and B, so there is no need to also have a copy for set B(makes a link to the file on A). That is the 30k foot version, and I am sure there is much more happening under the hood that allows for dedup magic
@dano, thank you for deep explanation.
I just installed openfiler on DL 380 G4 with proc 3.4 GHz dual cores. It's more then enough for only iscsi needs.
But if I go to NAS, I do agree using freeenas.
The load averages now is 1 - 4, the processor caused by (the cores).