Hi,
I'm currently in the process of migrating my data store which is located on a EOL (and too small) Synology device and on a HP/CentOS server running a few NFS shares. The end result is for a SMB/home use mixed together.
The Synology device works well as far as I am concerned, but it's small size (4 drives) makes flexibilty a problem, especially since I am planning to go RAID 10 all the way (uptime is so important that whatever extra cost this implies is irrelevant in my context). My Linux server also works, BUT everything must be done manually and I wanted the ease-of-use of a UI to manage NFS/iSCSI/etc. (I know iSCSI and OVM 4 don't mix)
So, at this point, I am thinking of a HP DL380G8 with a P420 raid card and a 25 bay SFF. The 25 bay will be overkill, but it gives me space to add a few drives in, migrate data to the new drive and repurpose the old drives (Many times over) and just add drives as needed - I tend to overspec my stuff, but it has always worked out for me.
My questions are:
- Should I go for hardware RAID 10 or put the raid card in JBOD mode and go software RAID 10, given that the RAID P420 card is already there?
- One aspect I like about my older HP server/RAID (I am using the hardware RAID right now) is that when a drives fails, there is a led that lights up on the drive tray and I know which one to change. No questions need to be asked, I just do a backup and swap the very clearly identified drive. Will this still be the case if I use software RAID? I imagine the hardware raid won't show up as degraded in OVM, but will show up as degraded only in the HP ILO UI if a HD fails.
- I know FreeNAS absolutely recommands to go with JBOD and software RAID, but it was also obvious from forum posts that a drive failure wasn't going to be as easy to fix as I mentionned above since you had to jump through hoops to know which one was broken. Is this the same thing with OMV, or will the UI give some info on the tray that needs to be changed?
- Finally, if I use one drive for OS only and the other 24 drives (in various RAID configurations) for data, would I (for example) be able to wipe the OMV drive and install CentOS (or other OS) and still get to mount the data drives easily? How much to the data drives rely on OVM being there? (not at all, or alot?)
My own little virtual machine test of OVM is positive, I like the UI, but I can`t simulate the P420 cards and tray leds on this, so I wanted to know what this all implies if I did buy this DL380G8. Also, if hardware RAID turns out to be the answer to my needs, I can downgrade to a G7 (the RAID cards don't do JBOD on the G7, so software raid would be possible with RAID0 but awkward UI-wise I believe)
Thanks a lot for whatever input you can provide.