I have two different FreeNAS boxes that are being used for storage. It is possible to link them in a manner that the linked connection can be presented as a single storage destination for clients? For example, I have one FreeNAS installation that has 6 TB of storage and another one that has 4 TB of storage. I would like to be able to present or have a single mapped drive for clients that would be able to span across both of them; however, the client would only see it as one drive. Is this possible? If not, is there a different way I should be approaching this problem? Is there a different OS distribution that would work better for this?
Linking FreeNAS Boxes
raidsoftware-raidstoragetruenas
Related Solutions
It's been mentioned that RAID is not a backup. VERY TRUE. Keep that in mind.
You're using terabyte sized disks, which increases the chances of an unrecoverable read error, which is a MAJOR PAIN IN THE @#$. Raid 5 is almost unusable as disks get larger; you could have one of the three disks fail completely, you replace it, and that's when you discover that one of the "good" disks has a spot that can't be read from, so you end up having to completely rebuild from backup. We had that happen with a hardware-based RAID (PERC controller).
Your RAID level depends on how you're using the server. I like 1 for most of my purposes (mirroring). It has very good read times because it can spread read commands across drives, but writes can suffer somewhat. How affected it is depends on what you're using for the controller and drive speed. Go to Wikipedia and search for RAID to get a rundown of RAID levels; no one can really tell you what to definitively use without knowing your workload, the server's usage, etc.
Do not use rsync for a backup on the same computer. If your controller is fried or something goes weird on the computer itself (or the machine is damaged in flooding, fire, electrical surge) you risk the backup getting toasted too. Backup means being able to rebuild your data on new hardware if need be after a catastrophic failure.
If you're referring to a hardware RAID controller built into the motherboard-don't. don't don't don't. Motherboard RAID is cheap, crappy, and cheap, and worse than any software-implemented RAID. If you want to go through the trouble of building a production system with RAID, use either the built-in Linux/BSD software RAID or get a good RAID card like one from 3Ware. Personally for a server, I'd get a hardware card and search the specs for features like hot swap capability and lighted alarms to indicate WHICH DRIVES have failed. There's nothing wrong with performance or ability of software RAID, and it's very reliable, but there are many questions about "I have a drive that failed and don't know which one it is", and if you screw it up you can break your data set or erase the wrong data. System administration is supposed to have some element of making your life easier (hee hee!) and puzzling which drive is which cable is which mountpoint is not fun. The hardware cards are $$ but often save you much frustration when trying to puzzle out which is in need of replacement.
Don't skimp on hard drive speed. Faster, the better, especially if this is a heavy usage server. Today's gig lans can easily make the hard disk a bottleneck now for big transfers or heavy sharing.
Make sure you have a way to monitor the RAID, and make it a point to periodically check the status of your drives.
Get a good backup system in. Any fileserver should have a good second-machine backup, whether to tape or disk. If your server blows up tomorrow you should be able to get parts in and start restoring everything from scratch if need be, unless the business issuing the paychecks can survive without their server, in which case I don't know why you'd be worried about RAID.
Hope this helps!
Windows recovery tools understand exactly two formats: NTFS and FAT. Unfortunately for you, neither are good choices for FreeNAS. FAT is too old to be useful, and NTFS is not as reliable as the other filesystems available for FreeNAS; not only does it not journal, the code-path isn't as robust as NTFS-on-Windows or EXT2/EXT3/XFS-on-Linux so there be bugs lurking.
NTFS can work on FreeNAS, it's just not a good idea.
Best Answer
In theory, yes. FreeNAS 8 supports NFSv4, and NFSv4 provides features called "replication", "Migration" and "referrals". From RFC 5661 / "Network File System (NFS) Version 4 Minor Version 1 Protocol", section 11.4:
This might do what you want in terms of namespace. Your users would, in theory, simply browse to a single network share, and the physical location of the NFS servers would be largely invisible to them.
Keep in mind that features mentioned in the FreeNAS GUI or commandline tools may not encompass all of NFSv4. You might need to hack it in, which can get you into trouble.
I haven't used these NFSv4 features at all, but I am looking at them now.
Note that "NFSv4 replication" is different then what most FreeNAS users mean by "Replication" (They mean ZFS snapshot/filesystem replication).
Note that some of the FreeNAS folks just finished up at the MeetBSD conference in Sunnyvale, CA and are brimming with new energy. It might be worth asking your question on the FreeNAS forums. I don't usually refer people to other forum sites, but in your case you might get more knowledgeable answers there.