OS choice for iSCSI storage?

Question

linux

Good day to all.
There is a task of building a cluster, and now the question of choosing an iSCSI storage has become.
What is the best way to lift?
As I understand it, you can raise it on almost any Linux, but there are problems with administration, they ask for beautiful buttons, since not only I can use it.
There is an offer with NAS4Free, how good is this offer? I haven't worked with FreeBSD before, I'm afraid for device drivers
. Can ZFS RAID6? how productive is it? How about hot autocorrect disks? SMART monitoring?
Are there any other options worth considering?

Answer 1

Well, if you have Windows Enikes, then try NAS4Free.

Answer 2

At us khranilki on a pure fre work. 2x10Gbit network cards, multipath, thin provisioning, VAAI, everything. On ZFS disks in different poses (zmirror, raidz{2}). We create moons on zvols, iSCSI target - based on ctld. Everything works fine.

Answer 3

if an appliance in the form of freenas, nexenta or something else wrapped in a beautiful shell is used for storage, then flexibility will not work. what do I mean by flexibility? for example, I have a server, with a bunch of hdd and a couple of ssds. for maximum performance of zfs, you need to use ssd under zil and cache, partitioning them. and it is even better to leave 10-15% free space on them so that the garbage collector does not suffer. and on hdd, in addition to the storage, it would be cool to install the operating system itself to manage the storage.
so, nexenta cannot do this. freenas I have not tried, but most likely, too, because. they work according to strictly defined patterns, which for some reason do not include such configurations. so the choice of real welders is FreeBSD or Linux. in principle, both can boot and equally successfully use zfs. I tried both, but on the first one, it seemed to me that zfs works an order of magnitude faster and it's easier to boot from zfs. for Linux, zfs is still not quite native, but there are mentions and even articles about successful loading.
if there is no experience in Linux / FreeBSD or without beautiful buttons in any way, then you will have to use eplines and suffer from their limitations. FreeBSD is fine with devices, link aggregation is also available. zfs can't use radi6, but it can do better: raidz is similar to raid5. raidz1 and raidz2 are the same as raidz only with two or three parity disks respectively. those. raidz1 will remain operational if two disks in the array fail, and raidz2 - three.
with hot-swap disks, zfs is much better than hard raids. zfs is a file system, not a disk array, and it knowswhere and what she has. therefore, when a disk crashes and is replaced, the rebuild will not occur on the entire disk, but only on the area occupied by data. multi-day raid rebuilds can be forgotten like a bad dream. smart has nothing to do with zfs: if the disk controller gives it away, then it will. if not, then no.

Answer 4

Look at www.freenas.org , I have 8tb backup storage in the works. For a couple of years there were no complaints.

Answer 5

Everything is very simple: you know linux, install openmediavault (it's on debian + web interface) you
know FreeBSD, install FreeNAS (also an excellent web interface)
Only in the first case there is no ZFS but there is ext4. Generally it doesn't matter linux or BSD. The main thing is to set it up normally "As you call the boat, so it will float" :)

Answer 6

What do you want from storage? why are there buttons? ;)
Raised almost three years ago three repositories on fedora, as a demon - scst. Raised based on this manual: habrahabr.ru/post/200466
They work. Buttons were not needed during this time;)

Answer 7

If 18TB of raw space is enough, then you can look at Nexenta. There will be both ease of management and optimization.