Help with new install please

fred974 · #1 August 17th, 2012, 16:50

Hello everyone,

I have been experimenting with FreeBSD for a while now and I now want to move from virtualbox to the real hardware.
The problem is that I do not know if what I have is ok for what I want to do... Could you please advise me?

I would like to set up a web/email server using FreeBSD 9 Release using a 3 jails setup for security using ZFS.
- 1x for webserver
- 1x for database (not sure if it should be on its own or not)
- 1x for Email Server

My hardware is as follow HP DL385 Dual AMD Opteron 2.6GHZ 6GB RAM 146GB SCSI hardrives (4x36.5GB).

My worry is that i'm not sure that the disk are big enough to do all that I said above.

Also do I need to use then in a raidz or to leave them as single zfs but then I loose a security in case of disk failure....

How would you guys deal with my situation based on my hardware?

Note I aslo have a spare 300Gb scsi disk at my disposale that I could fit in the server.

Thank you all in advance

fred974 · #2 August 17th, 2012, 19:36

Moderator,please move this post if i put in in the wrong forum

Terry_Kennedy · #3 August 17th, 2012, 20:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by fred974

My hardware is as follow HP DL385 Dual AMD Opteron 2.6GHZ 6GB RAM 146GB SCSI hardrives (4x36.5GB).

My worry is that i'm not sure that the disk are big enough to do all that I said above.

A complete FreeBSD install, including sources, and the ports you mention you need will fit on that size disk with no problem. Your main issue will be the amount of user data (email, database, web pages). That's something you'll need to determine for yourself.

Quote:

Also do I need to use then in a raidz or to leave them as single zfs but then I loose a security in case of disk failure....

How would you guys deal with my situation based on my hardware?

Given the small size of the drives, my first suggestion would be to use a hardware RAID controller (if your system has one, and the FreeBSD driver supports its RAID mode). RAID5 will give you 100GB usable. Depending on the capabilities of your controller, you could also dedicate one drive as a hot spare, so you'd have 66GB or so usable.

You could use ZFS. However, most ZFS advantages happen with much larger storage pools. It may be overkill unless you need some specific ZFS feature(s).

You might also look at the geom(8) system which provides a number of different storage classes.

One concern is how reliable those old drives will be. They are probably way beyond their expected service life and it may be difficult / expensive to locate replacements if one fails. Many servers of that generation used hot-swap carriers for the disks, and those tend to require a specific type of SCSI connector (SCA). It isn't possible to convert that setup to use SATA drives while preserving the hot-swap capability. Depending on the particular model, it may not be possible to use SATA drives at all (it depends on what sort of drive backplane there is, and the case layout).

fred974 · #4 August 17th, 2012, 21:14

Thank you Terry_Kennedy,

This give me a good start.
I'm now thinking if i should just sell the server on ebay and get another one that uses SATA drive.

What about the spare 300GB that i have, could that be of any good in my scenario?

Fred

Terry_Kennedy · #5 August 19th, 2012, 06:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by fred974

What about the spare 300GB that i have, could that be of any good in my scenario?

Well, if you need more disk storage than you get with your 36.5GB drives, it'll help. But without a second drive the same size to mirror it to, a failure of that drive will render your system unusable until you replace it and restore from backups.

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