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Please help superboyac build a server (2013 edition).
Stoic Joker:
@Stoic Joker: Any idea of the kilowatt per hour usage of that unit?-skwire (August 05, 2013, 06:37 PM)
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An exact number no...But the accountant hasn't screamed yet, and I asked him to keep an eye on the light bill when the rack came online to see if there was a discernible jump from the old cluster of towers.
I was originally told about these by a client that had been using one for a few years to keep their bedroom cooler at night instead of using the main house a/c unit. They say their light bill is actually lower for it.
wraith808:
oh yeah...never used the pool feature in Windows server.
-40hz (August 05, 2013, 06:48 PM)
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I did... and I lived to regret it. I wouldn't trust it after that incident if they paid me to.
superboyac:
oh yeah...never used the pool feature in Windows server.
But that's only because the servers I spec are purpose built and configured for specific tasks, so the storage configuration in them remains static for their service life. And to date, none of my clients were looking for anything quite as big as what you're planning.
I also tend to veer towards multiple smaller rather than one large server purely to avoid a single point of failure scenario and also to provide some flexibility down the road.
YMMV. 8)
-40hz (August 05, 2013, 06:48 PM)
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I'll check out FreeNAS. The primary purpose of this particular server is just plain old file storage. So I don't need all the Windows Server stuff, it's just that it's the only one I've seen that could do drive pooling the way i'm imagining. All the other ones were either RAID related, or using software to do the drive pooling. So FreeNAS will be my next experiment. I'd actually prefer if a Linux system could do it nicely.
I guess for multiple servers, i don't understand what methodolgy I'd use to split the servers up. Are you saying multiple boxes each running FreeNAS on it? Or one FreeNAS install, with multiple storage boxes connected to it? Or maybe even one FreeNAS install, with VM's of other FreeNAS's?
What I've been trying to do all these years is to avoid even drive pooling. So music on one drive, videos on another, etc. but the videos quickly take over the space. So then it's like, do i have one drive for tv shows, another for feature films, another for family videos (uncompressed, quickly take up all the space, gah!)?
Good progress so far, I'm getting excited. Looks like I've figured out my enclosure, so that's done. Now which OS do I need? It's all about drive pooling now.
superboyac:
Interesting, regarding FreeNAS and replacing drives:
The recommended method for expanding the size of a ZFS pool is to pre-plan the number of disks in a vdev and to stripe additional vdevs using the ZFS Volume Manager as additional capacity is needed.
However, this is not an option if you do not have open drive ports or the ability to add a SAS/SATA HBA card. In this case, you can replace one disk at a time with a larger disk, wait for the resilvering process to incorporate the new disk into the pool completes, then repeat with another disk until all of the disks have been replaced. This process is slow and places the system in a degraded state. Since a failure at this point could be disastrous, do not attempt this method unless the system has a reliable backup.
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Don't like the sound of that last bit. I guess it is saying, when you run out of space, it's best NOT to try to replace the existing drives with bigger ones, but rather, just add storage. That is certainly possible with my setup.
But I still have questions about how to deal with drives dying that need to be replaced. And also, exactly how do i incorporate an additional (new) disk into an existing volume? Or is it better to add a separate volume? Maybe I need to understand better what people mean by disk vs. volume vs. server.
Here's the goal...let's say all my shows are in a pool spanning 3 drives, that pool is called "TVshows". Now, I run out of space. I want to add a new 4TB drive to the "TVshows" volume. I don't want a new volume because now all my tv shows are in two different places. So how do I do that?
Stoic Joker:
oh yeah...never used the pool feature in Windows server.
-40hz (August 05, 2013, 06:48 PM)
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I did... and I lived to regret it. I wouldn't trust it after that incident if they paid me to.
-wraith808 (August 05, 2013, 07:48 PM)
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Is that for the WHS version, the new version, or both? I've never had occasion to play with it ... But I've got all my VMs on an 8 disk hardware RAID5 array.
@SB disks are physical, volumes (think partition) are virtual. Only catch is that RAID arrays also get called volumes by the controller software even though you can create multiple (partition) volumes within them.
how storage gets added to an array depends on the RAID controller used. Mainstream commercial is better as they have more features and will be easier to find replacements 5 or so years from now if one blows.
I liked 40's 2 server idea so you can Linux the storage and use Win12 for the Hyper-V virtualization stuff. That config strikes me as the most fun to play with.
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