I’m currently in the fun process of building out a new home network with Rockstor as my NAS server. The new network will be 10GbE and I’m trying to figure out the best use of hardware. In this situation, where data will be accessed and transfered at 10GbE on the internal network by multiple users and processes, does Rockstor prefer lots of CPU cores or less but faster cores? I also see that installing this on a VM should be fine. However, from a pure performance prespective, is it better to let Rockstor have it’s own dedicated hardware or run through a VM? If running on a VM, it will likely share the box with pfSense.
I don’t have 10Gbe yet but I’ve been planning to upgrade in the next 6-12 months. I choose to run my Rockstor box as a standalone whitebox currently running on a AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini (4 cores @ 2.05GHz). I haven’t had any issues with CPU speed yet but I’m not ruling out the newer Xeon D chips for a future long term solution… I used to have my NAS running via a VM but the one time I had issues with that server my NAS & router went down which caused wayyyy more issues than just dealing with the server issue so I took those two components and they’re their own boxes now.
What will be the main need for 10GbE? I’m interested in it for large(50GB - 500GB) file transfer backup & storage, but if it’s many smaller files, I think that balancing, scrubbing and snapshots may be bottlenecked with a slower CPU.
10GB + RockStor is going to depend a lot on the type of hardware you choose. Of course RockStor will perform better on it’s own hardware, but that doesn’t mean it can’t perform well virtualized. It’s going to be hard to answer your question since you don’t give any hardware details or the performance you are trying to achieve.
Thank you for the quick replies.
Why 10GbE? I currently have a symmetric 1 gig internet connection that could likely see a bump to 2 gig or higher in the next 6 months or so. I will be using the network for large file downloads and transfers both on the LAN and WAN. Another reason for going to 10GbE, it’s fun to learn new things and I enjoy the hardware.
As far as the hardware that I currently have, not much. I’ve acquired a few things as I’ve come across good deals that I know I’ll be able to use. I’ve got an empty server rack at home, a Netgear XS712T 10GbE switch and a Xeon E5-2683 v3 14 core processor. Not much but a few things to build around. As I continue to research and learn, I’ll be purchasing additional hardware.
Does Rockstor benefit from parallelization or fewer faster cores? I know with ZFS, the more ram the better or about 1 gig per 1 TB of raw storage. Does BTRFS follow the same general rule? Again, I appreciate the help and advice, as I’m trying to learn as much as I can.