Documenting my journey experiencing new technologies and life
Just logged in and discovered my Veeam server is not working. Both the Veeam service and the SQL service refuse to start. Looking around the internet it looks like renaming a Veeam/SQL server is not good for your Veeam/SQL installation and I might have done exactly that. Posts date back to 2013.
Since I haven’t actually done anything with Veeam since the original installation, I’m just going to repair install and go from there. So far so good.
It’s been about a month since I re-setup my FreeNAS box. The first iteration was really just a test deployment since the chassis it was originally installed in, only supported two HDDs.
While this particular chassis of mine supports up to 8 drives, the motherboard only has built in support for 4 and I’ll likely need to find a SAS HBA and perhaps some power connectors to hook up additional drives. A SATA card will do normally for SATA drives but I actually have an enterprise SAS SSD that could be used to help with the performance.
I’ve discovered some limitations with FreeNAS. While it is a good platform for home use, it is making a foray into the enterprise space. However without support for the following features I don’t know how well it will do.
Instead of striping the RAID parity across physical volumes, erasure coding divides the PVs into chunks and stripes the parity across chunks. The main benefit to this is RAID rebuild times are cut down significantly, esp with the large capacity SATA drives these days, as the empty spaces are skipped in the RAID rebuild. Without this, the re-silver process for FreeNAS can take hours/days depending on the size of the physical volumes. It is because of this, the internet forums are littered with RAIDZ2 (RAID6) or die comments.
This hasn’t been a concern for major vendors like HPE/Lenovo/Dell for close to, if not over, a decade.
Some small NAS deployments may have started with 2 large capacity drives, setup in a RAID 1 mirror for redundancy. As storage requirements grow, it makes sense to add drives to the array and maybe even change to a RAID 5 or RAID 6 for better efficiency. (You only lose 1 drive for RAID5 for parity, and 2 for RAID6, but RAID1/10 you lose half of the capacity of your drives). Without the ability to dynamically change the RAID type after the pool has been set up, the only way around this is to backup the data, rebuild the pool, and restore the data. That, or migrate/replicate the data to a new pool with the new RAID already setup. While inconvenient, this is not likely to be an everyday challenge as you’re not likely to change RAID types often.
As mentioned above, storage requirements are growing constantly. Without any support to add drives to an existing RAID array, FreeNAS requires you to increase your storage a vdev at a time. Meaning if you had 4x 4TB drives in a RAID6, you’re going to need 4x 4TB in another RAID 6, and put them into a RAID 60 to grow the storage pool. You’re not going to be able to expand it into a 5x or 6x or even 8x 4TB RAID 6.
Both of these are features I’ve seen in the enterprise space literally 2 decades ago.
The only real workaround is to plan ahead so you don’t get yourself into a situation where you need to grow your pool or change the RAID type. Some people recommend throwing as many drives as you can into a RAIDZ2 and pray you won’t run out. Others suggest building 4x drive vdevs as a time and adding them to the pool in a stripe and hope you don’t have two drive failures in one vdev.
The good news is that FreeNAS is actually based on ZFS and I’ve seen documentation pointing towards support for dRAID but reviews have been spotty? Still need to do some more research and reading into this area.
Have to admit though lack of these two features are enough to make me keep looking for another NAS OS/FS.
Make sure the Volume Shadow Copy service is running and set to automatically start as well as the Windows Backup service.
My file backups were running ok but the system image backup was failing.
When the back up destination is a network share, Windows Server Backup only saves the most current system image, overwriting the previous backup each time it runs.
This is hardly a backup as a failed backup will obviously fail to save anything, but it will likely destroy the previous backup in the process as that’s what it’s been programmed to do (save most current image only).
The only way and the recommended way to have multiple images saved is to set the backup destination to disk. This is also hardly a backup as it requires a physical disk to be installed locally and dedicated for backups, when the whole goal of backups is to get the data off of the local computer.
Luckily my NAS server is capable of sharing iSCSI targets and so I provisioned a 1TB disk to the server via iSCSI software initiator. I followed the instructions here even though I don’t have a netgear, the screenshots were pretty useful: https://kb.netgear.com/28432/How-do-I-back-up-data-from-a-Windows-Server-to-an-iSCSI-LUN-on-a-ReadyNAS-OS-6-system.
There was also a youtube video I watched on setting up iSCSI on FreeNAS to get the juices going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FO9VYgKWdQ.
Will have to wait for tonight’s backup run at 9pm to see if it worked or not!
I was trying to independently backup my files in OneDrive but the backup application couldn’t even find the OneDrive folder. Turns out none of my files on OneDrive were stored on my computer by default. (This was not the default OneDrive setting on my work computer for some reason.) I unchecked Files On-Demand and OneDrive downloaded all of my files to my computer.
I recommend this setting change on your main computer where you have sufficient storage and you do want your files stored locally.
