From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Feb 19 01:17:48 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7274E1065672 for ; Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:17:48 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from matt@webcontracts.co.uk) Received: from batfink.vm.bytemark.co.uk (batfink.vm.bytemark.co.uk [80.68.95.231]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3878F8FC15 for ; Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:17:47 +0000 (UTC) Received: from www.webcontracts.co.uk (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by batfink.vm.bytemark.co.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id D5184138023 for ; Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:00:57 +0000 (GMT) Received: from 212.159.19.37 (SquirrelMail authenticated user mlaw) by www.webcontracts.co.uk with HTTP; Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:00:57 -0000 Message-ID: <7f7816241a0798cf35b2d4801325c503.squirrel@www.webcontracts.co.uk> Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:00:57 -0000 From: "Matthew Law" To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.19 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Importance: Normal Subject: Options for redundant storage cluster? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: matt@webcontracts.co.uk List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:17:48 -0000 Hi, hopefully I'm not too far out posting this question here. It takes in a lot of areas so I was unsure where to post it. If it belongs on another ML please advise and I will re-post it there. I am researching options for a two node failover storage cluster. This is primarily to provide shared storage (either iSCSI or NFS) for XenServer VMs. I am looking to get the best bang for the buck and wondering if FreeBSD might be a good choice? Hardware-wise we have available two identical supermicro chassis each with 16 x SAS bays and a choice of AMD or latest Xeon 5500 CPUs, together with as many gigabit cards as we need but the budget won't stretch to faster networking. It would be nice to take advantage of ZFS and use two or three 8-port SAS HBAs in each server rather than expensive hardware RAID cards. We don't need to store more than around 2TB but we would like to comfortably service around a 75 - 100 VM instances (the VMs on average, are not too I/O heavy). Thin provisioning and snapshots would be nice, too. My initial thoughts were that we might be able to use ZFS, cheap LSI 8 port SAS HBAs together with a dozen or so SATA II drives and a couple of Intel X25E SSDs to help things along. It would be great if these boxen could network boot, so we can use all the drive bays for storage. I have no idea what options exist for clustering NFS/redundancy. I would be very grateful for any advice - especially from anyone who has experience in the same scenario. Thanks in advance, Matt.