I am getting access to a couple Supermicro systems (24 bay drive servers). I was wondering if FreeNAS had any sort of clustering capabilities to utilize the 48 drive bays but spread the load to the two different servers to do their own tasks? Essentially i would like it to present a unified “shared”.
Does not exist at this time. I believe gluster is on the long term roadmap, but from what I understand, they are waiting for the FreeBSD implementation to mature.
1 Like
You’ll have one computer with 24 drive bays running FreeNAS and another computer with another 24 drive bays running FreeNAS…
So, what exactly does “spread the load” mean in your question?
Do you want some type of high availability/failover solution where files would be replicated so you can seamlessly reboot one of the boxes without having to take your windows mount points offline? or did you mean something else?
1 Like
You could remove the motherboard from the second server and replace it with a SAS expander board of you can find one that fits. Basically turn it into a disk shelf.
Alternatively make use of the fact you have mirrored infrastructure and put one at a friend’s house for an off-site mirror.
Or just sell it 
how many clients will be using this “share”?
Cluster nor HA is supported by FreeNAS. You can do HA in TrueNAS tho.
If you want to “combine” 2x24bay server in to 1 FreeNAS system. You can convert the second server to a disk shelf and use external HBA to pass the disks to the FreeNAS host. (~$50 for the board, $25x2 HBA external cards, $20 external SAS cable)
the clients would be about 10 machines on prem and a few off prem. I guess i was looking at a long way around doing the disk shelf idea. I tried doing one kind of DIY shelf a few years ago. It was nothing more then a power supply and a expansion card in the chassis. I used a paper clip and electrical tape to short it out and then just used the power supply to turn on and off power. I was a bit nervous about not have some sort of brain in the unit to monitor vitals and power off the drives without just killing power. I thought some enterprise shelves have little web guis and was thinking something along those lines. I am open to other ideas if there are better DIY shelf tutorials out there.
I spent literally 30 minutes digging this up from watching this MONTHS ago. There’s a link to his blog where he explains a ton about his setup and it sounds like you would gain a lot from this. Especially when you mentioned paper clipping a power supply, I remembered this.
EDIT: Direct article in case you prefer not video form http://jro.io/nas/
1 Like
Thanks, i remember seeing this a long while ago and completely forgot about it.
1 Like
If you want to move away from FreeNAS, you could also try some sort of deployment with Ceph, which can use all of these disks fairly easily. Promox is a fairly easy way to get this up and running without much effort. It is a bit different from FreeNAS though.
1 Like
That was a very interesting video, however I feel that most of the hoops he’s jumping through have to do with the location of his rack (which he mentions he’s stuck with currently, so not judging, and definitely relevant if in the same situation), but if noise weren’t a problem I’d go with a disk shelf instead of two servers, easier to manage, easier to expand (most can be daisy-chained), probably consumes less power too (compared to an actual server).