Archive for the ‘Open Filer’ Category

FreeNAS or OpenFiler

Friday, April 8th, 2011

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Something caught my eye recently.  FreeNAS.  Everybody claims that OpenFiler is a much superior system in terms of performance… but the latest release of FreeNAS supports something called ZFS… and ZFS was something that I had really wanted to look at….

One advantage of ZFS is that well.. it is cheaper in the sense that we no longer need to invest in really expensive RAID cards.  ZFS works best with JBODs.  And somehow.. ZFS sounds fast…. the way they use memory to actively cache the read/writes with their adaptive replacement cache (ARC) sounds more intelligent than the default linux disk caches used by Openfiler… and hey performance ain’t that bad when it can:

FreeNAS does have a very nice graph that shows cpu utilization and network bandwidth. During a large file copy, it topped out at 800 mbits/sec with average of 400 mbit/sec so a 1 GB network card is required to fully utilize its performance.
Read more: http://blog.patyuen.com/lessons/technology/openfiler-vs-freenas-tips-for-building-your-own-nas/#ixzz1IwH7FYaA


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OpenFiler with Esxi

Friday, April 8th, 2011

One of the main attractions of using OpenFiler together with my Esxi is that it allows me to easily scale the deployment of Esxi.  Suddenly, my servers become somewhat like akin to blade servers.  Each ESXI box can comprise solely of CPU and RAM.  No Storage!

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That is just so cool.  But of course, on top of being cool, such deployment offers great flexibility.  It allows the easy movement of Virtual Machines from one Esxi Host to another.  If one ESXI host is running low on resources, i.e. CPU or RAM, I can easily suspend the instance.  Remove it from the Esxi host configuration.  Add it into the destination Esxi host configuration.  And resume operations.

Tada!  The entire VM migrated across.  (Personally tried it out last night.. and it really worked.  Had to lah… too cool already.)

Hmmm… this sounds a bit like a poor man’s way of V-Motion?

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Openfiler Armageddon–Power Failure

Friday, April 8th, 2011

imageWhile going through the Openfiler forums… it suddenly dawned on me that Openfiler had an Achilles heel.  While traditional raid cards come with battery packs to ensure that data in the cache gets written directly to the disk, Openfiler had no such battery packs in place. 

Openfiler probably use the traditional Linux disk cache in some kind of write operations… and thus should a power outage occur… armageddon.

My fears were re-affirmed when I came across the posting:

No Volumes Shown After Power Failure

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OpenFiler Benchmarks

Friday, April 8th, 2011

Setup the OpenFiler and ran some benchmarks on it through an ISCSI channel.  I kind of think something is really wrong… feels like the bottleneck is either

  • OpenFiler is terribly inefficient or something
  • there is a performance issue with my OpenFiler network card…

oh btw, I did use the MOBO network card… which should be quite crappy as the MOBO is like many many years old…..

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Openfiler–Pumping it Up

Friday, April 8th, 2011

I happen to chance upon something called Openfiler while trying to sort out the backup issues.  I was intentionally trying to use the thecus N2200 device for my backups… but grew quickly frustrated by the AJAX web interface that came with it.  Why did they bother to build a fanciful UI like that …. which took 10s in between clicks?

Truly frustrating… so that set me down a windy path of alternative backup solutions.  I have long heard of FreeNas and Openfiler as open source products that allowed you to convert a Crappy Old PC into some kind of useful NAS, giving your old computer hardware a new lease of live…  sounds good to me….

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Experiences with Esxi and OpenFiler

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

The last few weeks had been terribly interesting.  I was busy ordering stuff from the US from both New Egg and Amazon.  It all started when the Sim Lim uncle wanted to charge me like 5k SGD to build a server with 32GB Ram.  I wanted 64GB and did not want to pay that kind of a price… and so… the adventure began…

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