While my current server setup is great for business use it really doesn’t have enough space for a hardcore cord-cutting setup. I will require more than the 4 terabytes I have available on my storage server right now. 25% of that is for business backups..the rest is for my new personal experiment.
Plex media server is all the rage but I stumbled across something that integrates Plex AND several other programs into a Linux virtual machine. I decided i wanted to run this VM directly off my storage server and then have it be a target for Hyper-V to use the storage server as only storage…the main server will handle the ram and the cpu processing(my server has 12 physical cores and 12 more virtual cores) so ram and cpu are not going to be a problem. The issue was using the storage server disk array as if it was local storage. Considering I have a 10 gig fiber connection between the main and storage servers bandwidth is not a problem. I have a few choices, SMB(EWWW), NFS(possibly), and ISCSI. I really know little about the latter two so off to research and learn I went..:)
If you want to read the details of my current network setup head here. After my preliminary research was done I decided on ISCSI and Windows and NFS really do not talk as reliably together as ISCSI does. FreeNAS made ISCSI setup a cakewalk…so did server 2012 R2. Within 10 minutes I had them connected over the 10G fiber connection that already existed. This also solved my backup to a remote location(aka i have the 610 now backing up to the 310 over ISCSI as if it was a local disk without having to “lie” to windows). The performance is astonishing. I have the FreeNAS box now doing nearly 2 gigabit per second sustained writes over the 10gig connection from the 610. This is getting geeky to the extreme..i’ll post a full write-up on etc-md.com….but I digress.