SAN/NAS Operating systems

[Lackadaisical]

I'm searching for a good OS to be used on a SAN/NAS system for a home lab. The system will be mainly used to run virtual machines on ESXi hosts. The main features I'm looking for would be iSCSI, NFS and support for software based RAID. I need to be able to have multiple volumes on the system,and be able to map the same volume to multiple targets via iSCSI. The goal is to have at least 3 hosts mapped to a specific volume(s), so that I can have a proper cluster of ESXi hosts using shared storage for a for a VMware lab. Everything will be connected through a gigabit Cisco switch with support for jumbo frames available.

 

This is going to run on an older server platform:

K10 Opteron quad core @2.5ghz

16GB DDR2

1 64GB SSD

6x 1TB Seagate ES HD's

Dual gigabit lan

 

Options I have already tried, Openfiler, Nexentastor, FreeNas. Out of these 3 the best was Openfiler, but the performance was quite terrible when it came to write speeds (this was tested running raid5 and raid10, both has write speeds in the range of 15-20MBps). Nexentastor failed to install, and FreeNas does not support mapping a single volume to multiple targets via iSCSI.

 

At this point I'm considering maybe just throwing CentOS on it, but I would prefer something a little more friendly to manage if it's possible. Does anyone have experience/advice on what might be the best to use for this type of setup?

Edited August 19, 2012 by Lackadaisical

[ryandigweed]

Openfiler has best iSCSI support, but FreeNAS is also easy to use, but has limited iSCSI support.

 

Have you tried Ver 8 of FreeNAS?

[Lackadaisical]

Openfiler has best iSCSI support, but FreeNAS is also easy to use, but has limited iSCSI support.

 

Have you tried Ver 8 of FreeNAS?

 

 

I have not tried ver 8 yet, but I will look in to it. As far as I am aware there is still the restriction of not being able to map a volume to multiple hosts using ISCSI (Hopefully this is something they changed?).

[ryandigweed]

I have not tried ver 8 yet, but I will look in to it. As far as I am aware there is still the restriction of not being able to map a volume to multiple hosts using ISCSI (Hopefully this is something they changed?).

 

Don't know about that, but give it a try. You might get lucky?

[Lackadaisical]

I tried FreeNas 8 last night, and it actually has some hardware compatibility issues with the system I am trying to use. Got through the install fine and then it just fails to boot properly. Next up will be CentOS, hopefully I can get some better results with that.

[ryandigweed]

I tried FreeNas 8 last night, and it actually has some hardware compatibility issues with the system I am trying to use. Got through the install fine and then it just fails to boot properly. Next up will be CentOS, hopefully I can get some better results with that.

 

I think you'll have better luck with CentOS ! Especially since many dedicated servers rely on CentOS as well

[Lackadaisical]

I'm about ready to throw this system out the window.... I've tried 5 operating systems, all suffer the same fate. Even CentOS was a mess on this system, and the performance was not anywhere near where it should have been using an NFS share. Certainly not useable for any type of shared storage.

 

Even using server 2008R2, and trying to get NFS working properly is proving to be a disaster. Server 2008 shows very promising speeds when using windows shares (75+MBps), but NFS is slower than my internet @4-5MBps.... Even given the extra overheard of NFS that makes no sense to me. I've tested the NFS speeds using both windows clients and linux, no joy either way.