I’m trying to engineer a new storage layout at home to replace my Synology NAS that is slowly filling up. I wanted to bypass any proprietary NAS supported Operating System, like Synology, QNAP, or TrueNAS, and build my own.
I just bought a Minisforum NAB5 with 16GB of RAM (Max at 32GB) that is currently running RHEL 8 and KVM/libvirt for hosting my VMs. The thought was to use this same machine to install OpenZFS (I’ve already been testing OpenZFS on a RHEL8 VM with 4 virtual disk in a RAIDZ2 config) and direct attach an enclosure via USB 3.1 or 3.2 with 4x8TB drives in a RAIDZ1 configuration. Then setting up NFS for my home network to attach to that pool. Currently, on the Synology via NFS, I have some files (docs, spreadsheets, videos, photos and a movie/TV share for Plex) that is shared for the home network.
These are my questions:
What would be a good, reliable enclosure for this setup? I’ve been researching DAS enclosure brands in Mediasonic, Fantom, Startech, Yottamaster, & Terramaster and, based on reviews, I haven’t found a clear winner yet.
Would the NAB5 be able to handle the load between hosting the VMs (I’m already using up half the memory now on VMs) and handling ZFS? If so, would you recommend upgrading to 32GB? Or, would you recommend a separate dedicated machine?
What would be the recommended commands to setup the pool for RAIDZ1? I’ve done some research and found this site svennd.be/create-zfs-raidz2-pool/ where it looks as if basic commands are there to setup a RAIDZ2 pool and set tuning config. I used the same commands in my test VM, but for raidz1. Being new to ZFS, I wasn’t sure if that site was a good reference or not.
What are some recommended tuning settings for a RAIDZ1 pool?
Should I configure a spare drive for caching? If so, how would that be done via command line? I currently have a spare Samsung SSD 860 250GB drive in the Minisforum NAB5 I would think would be a good target caching drive.
How is server backup config handled with ZFS in a disaster recovery scenario? In other words, in a ZFS config, if my NAB5 was too have a hard crash (motherboard/CPU go boom, or lightning kills the computer, etc.), is there a way to have a saved ZFS config, replace the computer, restore the ZFS config, attach the enclosure and Bob’s Your Uncle? RAIDZ1 and all data restored?
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. And, for clarity, I have read articles, watched YouTube videos, even read the thread on this forum titled "ZFS Guide for starters and advanced users. Concepts, pool config, tuning, troubleshooting" and I still have the above questions. I just want to make sure I engineer my new storage correctly before I start buying and configuring.
Why would that matter? Reliability?
I do have a spare Lenovo ThinkCentre M700 Tiny doing nothing. I just don’t think it would have the necessary resources the NAB5 has, though.
Assuming that the zpool wasn’t damaged in some way, once your new computer was up and running you’d do zpool import -f [pool] and indeed Bob’s your uncle. All of the zpool settings live in the zpool, so there’s no real zfs config to restore.
So, I got one of my questions answered. Any chance someone (any ZFS experts) could help with the others?
Rehash:
What would be a good, reliable enclosure for this setup? I’ve been researching DAS enclosure brands in Mediasonic, Fantom, Startech, Yottamaster, & Terramaster and, based on reviews, I haven’t found a clear winner yet.
Would the NAB5 be able to handle the load between hosting the VMs (I’m already using up half the memory now on VMs) and handling ZFS? If so, would you recommend upgrading to 32GB 64GB? Or, would you recommend a separate dedicated machine?
What would be the recommended commands to setup the pool for RAIDZ1? I’ve done some research and found this site svennd.be/create-zfs-raidz2-pool/ where it looks as if basic commands are there to setup a RAIDZ2 pool and set tuning config. I used the same commands in my test VM, but for raidz1. Being new to ZFS, I wasn’t sure if that site was a good reference or not.
What are some recommended tuning settings for a RAIDZ1 pool?
Should I configure a spare drive for caching? If so, how would that be done via command line? I currently have a spare Samsung SSD 860 250GB drive in the Minisforum NAB5 I would think would be a good target caching drive.
Would the NAB5 be able to handle the load between hosting the VMs (I’m already using up half the memory now on VMs) and handling ZFS? If so, would you recommend upgrading to 32GB? Or, would you recommend a separate dedicated machine?
As a rule of thumb you can calculate 1GB memory for every 1TB of storage in your pool. But the more memory, the better.
I think you need definitely more RAM, maybe even 64GB. Every VM needs some RAM, your host needs RAM and your ZFS pool needs RAM.
Try to estimate what VMs you want to run, how much RAM they need and add that up.