Jul
12
A SAN on the Cheap: 1
July 12, 2010 |
I have bigger plans than I do pockets. Don’t most of us? This year the budget included replacing our aging HP ML570 “G nothing” we use to house data. Things have changed since it arrived on a pallet in my driveway five years ago: we want to separate our data storage from processing and centralize all of our data to one place, including virtual machines, user account shares, web site data, and video storage. Some things haven’t changed, namely the amount of time I have to volunteer and the amount of money we have: $2000.
For a couple of years I’ve been following the trend to an enterprise storage system (termed Storage Array Network or SAN) with other physical servers running virtual machines stored on the SAN. We’re a medium sized Atlantic Canadian church with a staff of 4 pastoral + 2 support + 2 maintenance so our drain on a system isn’t huge. The plan is to build a SAN from inexpensive hardware and then run it using FreeNAS. While this might be seen as overkill, we’re poising ourselves to provide IT support to our 1000+ members in the church: “Helping the community connect to God - helping God’s people connect to each other”.
Equipment
- HP DL180 G5 from HP Direct with trays via Nautilusnet.com (thanks Jason!)
- 4 - 2Tb SATA Western Digital drives from TigerDirect.ca
- an HP NC320T PCI-E Gb NIC from eBay (thanks chanvasa!)
- FreeNas on a CDROM
I’ve used SCSI for almost twenty years and love it, but lately our disk usage has grown and the cost of supporting it with SCSI isn’t possible. Servers using SATA have been on the scene for long enough that I figured there should be some off-lease by now. I began my search by trolling eBay, but found that there wasn’t much in our price range that was practical for our situation.
Fortunately I found a reseller and with a little bit of research we were able to find a still-in-box unit that wasn’t the latest technology, but was new. So I ordered it up, along with the disks, trays and additional network card (the model of DL180 only has one network card) and waited for it all turn up.
Phase One: Assembly
This is hardly worthy of a section. The stuff arrived. I screwed the drives into the trays and replaced the spacers with them in the server. Opened up the server itself and installed the extra HP NIC card. The only trouble had was that our rack isn’t deep and the shelf for the server needed to be shortened. A visit to a friend’s automotive garage and we were good!
Phase Two: Hardware configuration
With everything put together I pressed the power button. The ML570 it’s replacing has a lot of fan noise, but the GL180 adds a distinctive fan tone to the equipment room and we’ll need to consider some sound-proofing around the room door. On boot the machine wanted to configure all four drives as a single RAID 5 drive. I did too, so I took the defaults.
Phase Three: OS configuration
FreeNAS comes as a 75Mb iso and I couldn’t get the machine to boot. Turned out that my CD burner has issues. A new CD booted “the very best” (it’s a Maritime expression) and after assigning IPs to the interface from the console menu I could contact the server though the webGUI. I had originally thought that I would be able to run from the CD and store the configuration to the USB drive. There weren’t any options to do this and so I looked at transferring the image onto the USB key.
All of the options for embedding and upgrading are available through a text menu on the console. Reasonably soon the OS was embedded on a small (1Gb) USB key and from there could reboot the machine from the USB key and begin working from it.
Phase Four: Disk setup
Using the Disk menu, I selected the Format choice and took the defaults to format the file system as one big UFS (the native freeBSD file system). From there the Mount Point option on the Disks menu enabled naming the file system and mounting it (under /mnt).
Phase Five: Services
FreeNAS supports most services you can think of, including nfs, cifs/smb, ftp, rsync, iSCSI target, daapd (iTunes) and snmp. To start I enabled ssh and since I have no users declared on the box, enabled root access and successfully logged in. I then turned off root access and configured authentication to come from LDAP (Access->LDAP) and was able to ssh in as an ldap user!
Where to from here?
So far I’ve tried only some vanilla kinds of operations, and it certainly isn’t ready for production yet. The two big issues yet to be addressed are to be sure that the authentication through LDAP is working as needed and that cifs/smb is configured correctly. Next month!
Resources
- http://dailycupoftech.com/howto-install-freenas/
- https://www.packtpub.com/learning-freenas/book