Posts made by Doyler3000

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

That is tremendous!
I can't stop watching.

@tim_g How is this working out for you? I've got a feisty 3 year old who's recently started really pushing the boundaries. Banning Paw Patrol is not having the desired effect!

I've not used LVM snapshotting before so it'll be good to experiment with it and understand it's advantages and limitations. It may not keep the end users (almost all developers) happy so I might need to revisit.

If ZFS is a requirement do you think ZFS on Ubuntu rather than ZFS on FreeBSD say?
I'd need to get a lot more familiar with FreeBSD which is the disadvantage but maybe it's worthwhile?

Thanks all, I very much appreciate lots of great advice.
I've already got a XenServer installed and I'm going to take a look at Xen Orchestra now. As regards OS/Filesystems OpenSuse (or Centos) with XFS and LVM will get some testing in the near future.

@scottalanmiller said in OS/Filesystem for file server ~ 8Tb:

@Doyler3000 said in OS/Filesystem for file server ~ 8Tb:

We're almost entirely a linux operation here though we have a few windows clients.

Just have to mention that this fact makes ESXi a weird choice as you need a range of skills instead of being able to focus on the ones that you have. If you have Linux skills, you are ready for KVM or Xen

In my (shaky) defence I had stronger VMWare skills than Linux skills at the time

@scottalanmiller Sorry, my choice of terminology didn't make things very clear there. By replicating I mean replicating the functionality rather than the snapshots themselves. At the moment if I developer deletes a file by mistake they can go to the .zfs folder in the root of their home and restore the file from one of the daily snapshots. I think if they were no longer able to do the equivalent of this, that I might get some resistance.

Yes I'd keep using Veeam for backups. I'd class the snapshotting and backups as different functions really. I'd be hoping to use the snapshots for restoring single files or directories, the backups more for restoring the file server in a disaster.

£600 will keep me in beer for quite a while. I don't drink like I used to

So with Centos as the VM, would you use LVM snapshotting? ZFS on linux and BTRFS are not quite production ready seems to be a common (possibly wrong) consensus. There would be complaints if we lost the file system snapshotting that ZFS allows.

Without wanting to draw out the virtualisation platform questions anymore let me just say that the £600 or something we paid for essentials is not outrageous given that it's the platform

1. I'm most familar with and
2. the people in the company who would have to step in if I wasn't around are most familiar with

I completely accept that Xenserver and it's bells and whistles come for free and I'll definitely take it into consideration when I'm implementing a solution.

Now onto the filesystem and OS for the VM !

I get the centralised management, plus the agentless backup. And it's quite a bit cheaper than essentials plus as I remember. High availabilty is not a major concern for us.

Yes I can use Veeam (I use the free version) with vcenter on essentials to backup VMs

and yes it's snapshotting at the file level I'd need to replicate the daily zfs snapshots we've got now.

We're running ESXi essentials here. One reason I'd favour sticking with VMWare is that it's what I know best. Another is I'm kind of a 1 man band here as a sysadmin but I do have a deputy who works a tester who I've trained up a little bit in ESXi in case I'm not around and something happens.
Yes we're on ESXi 6.5 so it'd be a VMFS 5 datastore.

Hi all,

I'm hoping to get some (wise!) opinions on what I should or could do here.

I've got a 7 year old HP SAN that's nearing it's capacity. It's connected to a HP DL360 G7 running an old version of openindiana which operates as our fileserver. The SAN doesn't host VMs or databases, just home and shared directories for file storage. Now rather than try to increase the capacity of this SAN, I think it would make more sense to move our file's onto a new platform.

I know virtualisation is a must and we run VMware here so most likely I'd do something like this

1. get a newer HP DL360 or Dell RX730 or something similar
2. install ESXi 6.5 onto SD card
3. Setup a Raid 10 array using a hardware raid card.
4. Install a VM with one vmdk for the OS and one for the storage area.

Now I'm looking for advice on what the best OS and filesystem to use for the file server VM? Capacity would need to be in the region of 8 TB. We're almost entirely a linux operation here though we have a few windows clients. The current file server uses NFS v3 and samba for the fileshares, and the filesystem is ZFS. I'd like and have been asked, to keep the snapshot functionality that ZFS offers.

So one option is to stick with Openindiana and ZFS. One problem here is that it's an OS I'm not so familiar with. However it's been pretty solid for us except that once the storage pool where our home directories live gets close to full then our workstations start to crawl.
I could go with BTRFS as a filesystem to keep the snapshot ability. Am I best to use one of Opensuse or Suse enterprise server in this case?
Is there an issue using either of these filesystems on top of hardware raid? I guess not if I'm not using their RAID functions?
Centos and XFS with LVM? Do LVM snapshots provide similar functionally to the ZFS ones?
Or stick with ZFS but use FreeBSD.
Or finally just get a Synology and use that.

I'd be grateful for opinions including if it's just to say definitely don't do one of the options for some obvious reason that I'm not seeing.

cheers!

Thanks!
Long time listener - first time caller!

I'm sysadmin for a small software company. It's a great job but covers so many areas that sometimes I feel I'm stretched a little thin keeping up with everything. I do tend to visit here quite a lot. I almost always find interesting and new IT topics to read...