ZFS isn’t proprietary. TrueNAS is probably what most would want JBOD’s for these days. It’s running FreeBSD and OpenZFS. Both of which are open source-not proprietary. ZFS has made It’s way into Linux too, so you could do it that way too. The biggest issue is getting a RAID card that can be flashed to IT mode. Most of the PERC controllers in Dell servers 11th and 12 generation ones will do. I think the 13 generation will too, however I’m not sure about that. LSI cards have been historically the go-to cards. They were bought by someone and have since shot themselves in the foot and made it so you have to get an older card to do true JBOD. (AFAIK)
In the case of a PowerEdge R730XD loaded with 24 drives, you still need an OS that can “present” that storage to your network. You’ll need some kind of OS in that can support things like NFS, SMB, or iSCSI. And if you boot VMWare ESXi your storage will be specific to the host only unless you get VSAN licenses to share the host’s storage with other hosts in the VSPhere. So a JBOD may sound great, but the outcome of such an implementation could be disappointing if you need more than a large pool of network attached storage.
“Enterprise” class drives are designed and engineered for continuous operation. “Consumer” class drives are designed to have periods where the PC will be powered off and the drives will be at cold rest. Enterprise class drives are also designed with more data pathways to allow for higher IOPS, which is in essence how many simultaneous operations the drive can sustain before the cache fills and slows the performance.
Thank you for your comment below, Robert! We wholeheartedly agree!
This is wonderful! Paying it forward it a great way to make the world go around!
Great post! As you start learning about virtualization a few terms that may come in handy: Host – the physical server and the OS that physical server will boot from (Windows Server, VMWare ESX, or Hyper-V server are the bigger names out there)
Guest – the virtualized instance of an OS, can be Windows, UNIX, LINUX, or any operating system running in your virtual machine server.
Virtualization engine or virtual machine server – The thing your physical server loads or the OS your physical server loads to allow the creation of shared resource pools that you can share out to your virtual machines. Also called a virtual machine server. Can be an OS as in the case of VMWare ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V server, or it can be an application server running on your physical host OS as in the case of a Windows 2016 Server running Hyper-V services.
Virtual server – a server-based OS running within your virtual machine server :-)
Virtual machine – any configured bootable operating system used by your virtual machine server to boot an OS kernel. Windows 10, Ubuntu, pretty much anything you can boot a computer with, you can virtualize.
You can also uses virtualization tools like VMWare ESX to boot on Apple hardware and then you can create virtual machines with Apple OS X versions. Only works on the Intel based Macs, not the Apple A5 CPU.
Now I’ll wait for Mike to start a blog post on data virtualization because that’s where the fun gets going, LOL.
Great information it was helpfull.
Thank you so much for the positive feedback, Greg. We’re so glad you’re enjoying TechMikeNY and really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with us!
Thanks for reaching out, Sam. I do not agree with that statement. Using 1000 servers for one hour does cost more to run than one server for 100 hours.
The price difference comes from the specifications of each server being used to acquire the results desired. 1000 servers of even the simplest configuration would cost more to run for one hour than one server on the high end side.
As for performance, having 1000 servers performing tasks for one hour would ensure that not each server is under too much load and allows one server to fail and have others pick up the slack.
Having one server running everything would pave the way for critical failures bringing down an entire business, which would result in loss of productivity and loss of revenue depending on what is being run on the server.
In conclusion, running one server for 1000 hours or 1000 servers for one hour does come with cost differences initially and in the long run in terms of failure prevention and productivity loss.
So, how accurate do you think this statement is:
“…Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours.”
https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf
I just wanted to drop a comment to say that you guys are doing a phenomenal job. Your prices are very competitive and your website is top notch. Keep up the good job!
Thanks for the note below, Mhz! Yes, that’s the idea – to create resources for folks to have refreshers on tech subjects (and primers for people who may be new to the world of RAM upgrades & installs). We are always looking for new topics that our customers want to hear about, so feel free to share a topic you would like us to cover. Thanks again!
Thanks for the review.
We learned this stuff ages ago. But it tends to slip away if not using it day by day.
I think I will save this away so that we can easily refer to it the next time we upgrade RAM.
Simple and crisp article
Site was very helpful thank you
Hi Dustin. Thanks for your question below. The H700 Mini is not compatible with the R720XD server. You’ll need the H710 or H710P (the P has a large cache). You can find these on our site under Products → Components → RAID Controllers, or you can search ‘H710’ in the search box.
Do you have a RAID controller that I can use instead of my H700 mini in a Dell R720XD? I have updated it to the latest firmware but it’s still saying blocked to all of the 2.5" non Dell drives I’ve installed. I see them spun up and ready in idrac with 512 block size but can’t creat a VD still. They are 600GB 10k IBM drives.
Thanks for any information!
Dustin
Hi Ronnie. Thanks for the comment below. You are correct: ZFS is open source and not proprietary software. What we were trying to get at was ZRAID is exclusive to ZFS. That said, we’ve rephrased this in the blog post to be clear. As for the RAID card, we normally recommend the LSI 9211-8i or 9217-8i as long as it does not have any special firmware installed. The stock firmware should allow for pass-through. Over the past year, we had received some of these with the passthrough available and some with RAID only.
— TechMike