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Why integrate the NAS? I run a Synology full of spinning rust for backups, archives, and shared file storage. It works reliably and is stupid simple to maintai

by antsar 7y ago

Why integrate the NAS? I run a Synology full of spinning rust for backups, archives, and shared file storage. It works reliably and is stupid simple to maintain. Adjacent to that is a server running Proxmox, and I'm currently working to add Kubernetes/Rancher as a layer on top of that. The Proxmox server has a local SSD array so the VMs have fast low-latency storage. VMs that touch larger files (media server, etc) have an NFS mount to the NAS. IMHO the financial/maintenance overhead of a second unit is totally outweighed by the easy opportunity to have two performance and reliability tiers (fast homelab vs reliable slow storage), ability to upgrade/change the two units independently of each other, and ability for cohabitants to use the NAS without having to understand/deal with the virtualization stuff.

tracker1 7y ago
I have an older Synology NAS, it's really slow, and TBH need more compute for a few things at home... but don't want to spend on yet another box for this. The main role of the new server is NAS stuff, but if I can do a few other things in the background, so much the better. I'll be running proxmox and VMs off of an nvme drive in a 4x pcie adapter, and the NAS drives using the hotswap bays in the front.. it's a used R710 (iirc), and has 6 3.5" bays (came with 2TB drives, but replacing the raid controller with one that will support larger drives and upgrading to 8TB as time/cost permits). I could totally drop the home server compute requirement before the NAS requirement as my desktop could handle those chores.
- unethical_ban 7y ago
  TBH FreeNAS is a great NAS/SAN solution. I'm running a 4x4 RAIDZ2 (8TB effective) with a 10 year old quad core AMD and 16GB DDR2 RAM. If you are okay with the limited VM hosting capabilities of Freenas (headless VMs and containers on the same network as the file server) then you can use it for that as well.

by antsar 7y ago

tracker1 7y ago

I have an older Synology NAS, it's really slow, and TBH need more compute for a few things at home... but don't want to spend on yet another box for this. The main role of the new server is NAS stuff, but if I can do a few other things in the background, so much the better. I'll be running proxmox and VMs off of an nvme drive in a 4x pcie adapter, and the NAS drives using the hotswap bays in the front.. it's a used R710 (iirc), and has 6 3.5" bays (came with 2TB drives, but replacing the raid controller with one that will support larger drives and upgrading to 8TB as time/cost permits). I could totally drop the home server compute requirement before the NAS requirement as my desktop could handle those chores.

unethical_ban 7y ago
TBH FreeNAS is a great NAS/SAN solution. I'm running a 4x4 RAIDZ2 (8TB effective) with a 10 year old quad core AMD and 16GB DDR2 RAM. If you are okay with the limited VM hosting capabilities of Freenas (headless VMs and containers on the same network as the file server) then you can use it for that as well.