I’m planning to deploy a file server in one of our company’s departments in the near future. Preferably it should support file-level access via SMB and NFS, also, an iSCSI support will be a plus. In-built backup / replication features would be a great plus as well.
I have a single physical server currently in my homelab, which will be later used in the production, so I’ve built a test lab around that. Also, I can borrow one more server from my company if necessary. I’ve done a brief research on this topic already and choosed between FreeNAS and Windows File Server on top of Storage Spaces as a possible candidates.
I’ve already tested FreeNAS, but the performance is no good. There are only maximum 250 MBps I can make out of it for some reason. I have Intel 10GbE NIC in the server, as well as 2x E5-2603 v3 and 96GB of RAM. Zpool is RAIDZ2 – 9 drives with LSI MegaRAID 2208 and JBOD mode. Maybe there’s some mistakes I’ve done in the configuration, cause I’m not a specialist with Linux, so I’ll try to test Storage Spaces there.
Is there any other feasible free / low cost file server solutions? My goal is to build the most cost-efficient solution to test and then roll it into production. Are there any misconfigurations with the hardware with my previous FreeNAS setup?
Many thanks!
Answer
One server = single point of failure. I'd consider getting two of those and cluster them into HA file server.
1) Windows Server. You can use Standard or even free Hyper-V Server, and bring in free StarWind vSAN for shared storage.
At the end of the day you'll get iSCSI/SMB3 HA file server with the best of breed iSCSI and SMB3 stacks for free :)
Storage Spaces Direct is another option, but it requires Datacenter license all-around which means unlimited VMs and has no sense on SoFS, you basically will be leaving money on the table :( + S2D has HUGE resiliency issues in a two and three node configs (no local reconstruction codes).
2) FreeNAS. I'd use FreeBSD which is what iX team used to fork-out FreeNAS from or Linux. ZFS of course! There are numerous options to make it HA.
https://github.com/ewwhite/zfs-ha/wiki
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