File server for small business


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Hey. I'm wondering if anyone has a couple of tips regarding file servers(Samba) for a small business. I'm planning to have 2 file servers, which syncs at night over WAN. Now, I'm wondering what the best solution for the file servers are. The company has <60 employees and I'd like to have a cheap, but good enough solution. I was thinking about having a Hyper-V 2008 r2 or ESXi server with lots of local storage, which would have 3 centos vms; a ldap/dns vm, a nagios vm and a file server vm(samba). But this is where the problems start.

I was thinking about having a raid controller which would make a RAID10 volume where the vm's os-disks where located, and a RAID5 volume for the file storage volume. But from what I've read, ESXi at least, don't support local physical access(RDM). Then I'm stuck with vhds on the raid5 volume. Now, won't that be a huge blow to HDD speeds?

Another solution would be an iSCSI SAN in each location which would have the file storage volume for me(guessing RAID5 still), but aren't those pretty expensive? And does rsync work when the storage is through iSCSI? And if chosing SAN, should you have the os-disk on the san too or local storage?

Another option would be a dedicated NAS. But again, aren't those expensive? Also, would rsync even work on a dedicated NAS?

I expect to have 6 TB for file server storage(the company would mostly store ~5MB pdf files, so 6TB should be enough for a while).

Anyone who got experience with this who could give me a recommendation? Please help me :)

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First off, why would you create a 6TB anything if they are storing 5MB files -- are they storing like a million of them? If less than 60 people, that is sure a lot of pdfs each ;)

You are so over thinking this..

Lets start with the first thing -- what is your budget? What infrastructure do they have in place now? You mention you want to sync the files across a wan? What connections do these locations have. Do you have vpn setup, you don't just rsync company files across the public internet in the clear.

Raid 10? Really they need that? Wouldn't 1 be enough? How are you going to actually backup this 6TBs or do you feel your sync is a backup?

What is nagios gong to be doing? You feel you need that for 1 server? Why do you feel you need to create a vm setup with 3 different machines running?

So again what do they use for file storage now, do they already have an AD?

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Hey. I'm wondering if anyone has a couple of tips regarding file servers(Samba) for a small business. I'm planning to have 2 file servers, which syncs at night over WAN. Now, I'm wondering what the best solution for the file servers are. The company has <60 employees and I'd like to have a cheap, but good enough solution. I was thinking about having a Hyper-V 2008 r2 or ESXi server with lots of local storage, which would have 3 centos vms; a ldap/dns vm, a nagios vm and a file server vm(samba). But this is where the problems start.

I was thinking about having a raid controller which would make a RAID10 volume where the vm's os-disks where located, and a RAID5 volume for the file storage volume. But from what I've read, ESXi at least, don't support local physical access(RDM). Then I'm stuck with vhds on the raid5 volume. Now, won't that be a huge blow to HDD speeds?

Another solution would be an iSCSI SAN in each location which would have the file storage volume for me(guessing RAID5 still), but aren't those pretty expensive? And does rsync work when the storage is through iSCSI? And if chosing SAN, should you have the os-disk on the san too or local storage?

Another option would be a dedicated NAS. But again, aren't those expensive? Also, would rsync even work on a dedicated NAS?

I expect to have 6 TB for file server storage(the company would mostly store ~5MB pdf files, so 6TB should be enough for a while).

Anyone who got experience with this who could give me a recommendation? Please help me :)

I'm sure ESXi does support RDM!

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I haven't particually had small business <60 for awhile now so storage on the lower end of the market is not my strong point, but I would think that a qnap would be sufficient for what you're wanting to complete. You can use ISCSI (or NFS) if you want ESX for VM's and you can host your fileserver via the qnap itself so you don't need to have another VM hosting the data.

you can do something like this: http://www.qnap.com/...35/snapshot.asp

But obviously scale it to your business size and needs.

I'm not saying any of the above is correct for your needs either and the information you have given us isn't really enough (refer to budman's post). I think qnap are still a decent brand....

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I'm sure ESXi does support RDM!

Hey. Thanks for answers from both of you. From what I've read, ESXi supports RDM, but RDM only supports LUNs and not locally attached disks(without hacks). Hacks are not acceptable as it can hurt stability. And for such a small network, where live migration is not an option, I can't risk having an esxi server crash.

Will a QNAP support samba shares with ldap support, while still serving LUNs for other servers(ex. for the mail server)?

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I do alot of small business implementations and I still run things cause of old school.

Sometimes I utilize cluster technology with Windows for maximum fail over capability, As Budman stated your budget is the major determining factor. I am curious to see other users best practices in a Virtualization enviornment with with a mirroring Image.

Budget constraints will mostly dictate that you will end up utilizing a R410 with a Raid1/Raid 5 for data and most likely a R1000 for backup and redudnant power supplies make sure you have 4 hour mission critical support x 24 x 7 replacement on your drives.

Depending on your Disaster Recovery plan, your worst case scenario would be dell sending you out a replacement part in 4 hours and you utilizing a frequent back up process daily.

Most companies cant afford and sometimes seems like over kill to just have a server replicating to another server especailly for 60 users.

Im really tired so if thats a bit jumbled I apologize but I would most likely end up with a good server warranty and a good backup system with a offsite back up plan. Such as the 3-2-1 backup system.

Thats just me.

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First off, why would you create a 6TB anything if they are storing 5MB files -- are they storing like a million of them? If less than 60 people, that is sure a lot of pdfs each ;)

You are so over thinking this..

Lets start with the first thing -- what is your budget? What infrastructure do they have in place now? You mention you want to sync the files across a wan? What connections do these locations have. Do you have vpn setup, you don't just rsync company files across the public internet in the clear.

Raid 10? Really they need that? Wouldn't 1 be enough? How are you going to actually backup this 6TBs or do you feel your sync is a backup?

What is nagios gong to be doing? You feel you need that for 1 server? Why do you feel you need to create a vm setup with 3 different machines running?

So again what do they use for file storage now, do they already have an AD?

Hey, sry I forgot to reply earlier. This is part of a school assignment so it has more servers then a company would have. We're designing a network for a company who has 2 sites + 15 employees spread around the country using vpn to get access. The assignment requires a web server, a mail server, samba and dns at least. We're supposed to design everything from scratch. We don't have a budget set, just that it should be cost effective, but with 60 employees, you can imagine that it won't be in the million dollar range. :) The 2 sites would be connected over site-2-site vpn over a min. 15/15 fiber optic cable thats only being used for vpn connections(including the 15 client vpns). In Norway, those lines are really cheap, so the internet connection shouldn't be a big problem. In the case the vpn connections breaks, the sites should be able to still work locally, so they both need file servers and dns. Rsync would be used over the site-2-site vpn.

The 6TB idea was just to be in the clear, since it doesn't cost that much anyways. It's overkill, but the file server will contain the data from other applications too, and private folders. Not just the projects. Backup would be done by syncing nightly between the servers so that both have the same. For long-term backup, tapes or external hdds would be used. It's not really been decided yet. First we need to know how the files are gonna be stored before we decide this. It could end up with external hdds, since the project files don't need to be kept for 10 years unlike financial records. Nagios is a requirement for the assignment, and will be used to monitor the servers only to get alerts since IT operations would be done by an employee who's working with other stuff too.

The idea for 2 servers was for redundancy, in case of a hardware failure(ex. motherboard, cpu, ram). The web server and mail server might also have load that varies from time to time, and if they were on the same server as the file server, it could force a bottleneck or downtime, which again stops the company. And since we begin from scratch, we thought about using openldap / 389 for directory service. Linux will be preferred to keep the cost down.

The RAID10 and RAID5 were just ideas to have some redundancy, but still keep some speed on the os disk(raid10).

I was hoping someone could help me figure out a good way to do this. If a single server with dual psus would be good enough, what kind of cpus and ram would be needed for such a setup? It's a pain in the *** to figure out those specs without having any historical data of traffic and load

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Hey. Thanks for answers from both of you. From what I've read, ESXi supports RDM, but RDM only supports LUNs and not locally attached disks(without hacks). Hacks are not acceptable as it can hurt stability. And for such a small network, where live migration is not an option, I can't risk having an esxi server crash.

Will a QNAP support samba shares with ldap support, while still serving LUNs for other servers(ex. for the mail server)?

I don't know for sure you'll have to look into this stuff!

http://www.qnap.com/pro_application.asp?ap_id=737

and I'm sure that it supports cifs or smb and iSCSI at the same time otherwise that'd be stupid!

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So this is a school project, ok your talking fantasy land stuff.. Because what your talking would never be done in the real world with a company with 60 people.

You would prob have a budget of like $2000 tops ;) Small companies, **** even big large companies don't like to spend money on IT!

Your not going to have the money to setup multiple servers, etc.. They would just not give it to you plain and simple.

These projects are pretty pointless if you ask me, if they are not going to bring it to the real world.. What existing infrastructure exists? Your not going to be starting from SCRATCH! What do the clients use for desktops? You talk about AD, but its quite possible in the real world they are use home versions of windows, because the person that was buying the PCs before they needed a server was saving 100 each and now they can not join a domain.

So Where is the budget and time frame for redeployment of their desktops? What are they using for tools, antivirus, management of desktop patches? etc. etc..

Keep the cost down? This is pointless -- give you a budget to work with. Or leave it open ended if you just playing in fantasy land anyway. Where you setup a Raid 10 server for 15 users saving pdf files ;)

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I know. It's completely pointless. We have to assume everything. so lets assume they have windows business/enterprise. lets assume there are no timeframe or anything.

If I were to have 6 virtual servers in the HQ(1x webserver with basic info site for max 100 sim. users, 1x ldap+dns+dhcp, 1x ldap+dns(slave) for backup, 1x fileserver(smb) that rsyncs to a similar server over night, 1x nagios for monitoring 10 servers total and 1x mailserver for the employees(postfix and dovecot). What kind of server would be needed? Is a dual cpu Xeon 5520(or only 1?), 16gb ram with local raid5 enough? And have an external rd1000 or something for backup? is it powerfull enough even when the fileserver is used by about 100 users at a time + web and mail with same amount users? Sounds like the fileserver and web+mail should be seperated, but I have no idea what kind of hardware requirements there are for such servers. Hard to read about too.

This setup would not provide much redundancy though, since if the server goes down, pretty much the whole company goes down for a day or more. :p

Anyone got ideas? Also, anyone know of a place that holds track of hardware requirements or something for specific software(with different levels of load)? Like a list of min. requirements. Does a site like that even exist? :)

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Multiple sans, multiple sites, san replication between sites, multiple servers to host vm's. You can even backup to the san storage if you have enough room, or pickup some backup servers and storage.

You can do this across as many sites as you'd wish/have budget for. San storage is not cheap. We are looking at a complete storage solution and 3 servers for around 100,000. How many small businesses can pust out 100,000 at a clip for san storage and a vitual environment? The san environment alone is going to be about half that, the rest is server hardware and software. About 20,000 in software licensing so you figure the rest is install/setup and servers. This is for 2 sites to be in complete replication of each other. This does not go into other costs including power, rack space, fire suppression, or air conditioning.

Min requirements....this goes into what is your budget. If you have a budget of a pc but want a dual six core server with 128GB of memory, well you are going to be in for a rude awakening. It comes down to storage how much do you currently need, how fast are you growing. I can give some numbers just off the cuff, but that may not be what you need right now. Figure out what the minimum requirements are for each server you want to put in, then at least tripple that.

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First off, why would you create a 6TB anything if they are storing 5MB files -- are they storing like a million of them? If less than 60 people, that is sure a lot of pdfs each ;)

You are so over thinking this..

Lets start with the first thing -- what is your budget? What infrastructure do they have in place now? You mention you want to sync the files across a wan? What connections do these locations have. Do you have vpn setup, you don't just rsync company files across the public internet in the clear.

Raid 10? Really they need that? Wouldn't 1 be enough? How are you going to actually backup this 6TBs or do you feel your sync is a backup?

What is nagios gong to be doing? You feel you need that for 1 server? Why do you feel you need to create a vm setup with 3 different machines running?

So again what do they use for file storage now, do they already have an AD?

where I am right now has 100 people and we have 15 TB of file storage :wacko: we have two HP MSA1000's set up on fiber channels all completely redundant to multiple servers and 92% of it is used! but then we have HIPAA laws to follow... I think our capacity maxes out at 48TB per MSA? I forget the exact specs... but we put smaller hard drives in the 28 slots

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You could give users 100PB of space, and they would use it. Does not mean its required to put it all in place today.

His example used 5MB PDFs to what would be stored.. He made no mention of any other file types.. But sure if you give users the space, they will use it ;) It is a loosing battle if you do not put into place guidelines of what is appropriate to be stored, and quotas should be mandated, etc. Or yeah you could give them 30 TB and they might suck it up in a week with their movies and mp3, etc.. Especially if you tie this to a big fat company pipe, and do not put into place filtering.

To size for growth you need to have an understanding of what is going to be stored, and the size and the number of files users could be expected to produce monthly/quarterly/etc

If you do not correctly plan for growth then yeah you can get hit in the budget really really bad. Because you need to move to new system when you hit the limit of it's storage, etc. But with the cost of storage dropping daily, you don't put in XTB of space, when only a small fraction of that will be needed for the next Y number of Months. You put that storage into place when needed, so that it can be purchased for lower cost.

If you max out at 48TB of space -- why don't you put it in now? ;) Because you know next month it will be cheaper - that is why!

If you are going to have these students work on how to setup infrastructure, how about giving them actual real world scenarios to work with. Vs this nonsense that they will never in a million years run into.

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Budman, that isn't necessarily true. If it were just throwing drives is sure it is cheaper.....san storage, it isn't cheaper to wait. It can be more expensive to wait. IE: the IT manager asks me how much space do you need. I look around get sizes and say, 14TB, this should cover backups and new VMs as well as existing VMs. The IT manager gets me 8TB, he says I can manage with that....a year later I am looking for more storage and SANs are still not cheap in the size I need. Now we are looking at 2 24TB sans to cover space and for replication. I can buy another shelf but only another 6TB which again will only buy me another year or 2 max. He wants 5 years to extend to the life of the product and the ability to add on...instead he got me the smallest possible san with the ability to only double the size... I wanted 30 Tb, I needed 16, I could get away with 14, 6 just cut off my nads now (and he did, my 1 year anniversary is in August with this 6TB san and I am at capacity).

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. If you max out at 48TB of space -- why don't you put it in now? ;) Because you know next month it will be cheaper - that is why
that's no where near true by what we've seen... we put in what we could afford at the time, and it never got cheaper, because 2yrs after we bought the MSA, it was on the obsolete list thank you HP.... and the drive prices for it never really went down.. .we're still looking at $500 a drive... 73GB 15K drive still cost us $330 to replace not talking about refurb drives, or used ones, but new stock drives... our last quote for a storage space upgrade came in at $16k! we only paid $10K for the drives when we put it in...

of course now since we are EOLing the SAN's we are looking at almost at $35K upgrade to get a larger SAN system

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Alot of different views here :) But for you professionals with some experience in this; do you have an idea of minimum spec for the server i (badly) described? If we'll try to make it one server per location with local storage only and rd1000 for backup. 100 users.

1x ldap+dns, 1x webserver(apache, only simple info sites with few pics), 1x fileserver(smb), 1x mail(postfix+dovecot imap) and 1 nagios VMs. Approx 100 users max(they're 60 now, so the usage is boosted already).

If we skip the space requirements for a moment. What would CPU and RAM min. requirements be? Can it be done on a single server, or will the fileserver en web+mail cripple it if they had 100 sim. users at the same time? If we need dual cpu, we'll just write it since we haven't been given a limit. So just try to keep it at a bare minimum, but still something that works :p

We assume they could survive a 24-48 hour period downtime since fileserver and ldap+dns would be available through vpn, so with local storage and backup of server snapshots, it could be done with local storage on a single server i hope.

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I will go a bit overkill, dual quad xeon's with 32GB of ram. this will give expansion as needed or wanted. you could go 24GB. An R410 or a R415 would work just fine, if you go dell.

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I will go a bit overkill, dual quad xeon's with 32GB of ram. this will give expansion as needed or wanted. you could go 24GB. An R410 or a R415 would work just fine, if you go dell.

Okey. Maybe we'll try that then, with redundant psu. Btw, is the R410/R415 only available with the default 2 nic ports when you have a raid card? 1 goes for management to control the esxi server, right? so you're stuck with 1 nic for all the traffic? or does the baseboard management .. or idrac include a lan port you could use to connect to the esxi?

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The management nic can also be used for vm traffic. The 410 should also support expansion slots, order with more nics. You could up to 510's or 515s if needed, you asked for min so a 410 would be min. I have 510s loaded with nics. If doing vmotion you need at least 1 dedicated nic for that and 2 dedicated nics for a san.

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Btw. How could backup be done if there's only one server, with esxi and raid5 or raid? Syncing the data between file server vms in 2 locations is done with rsync, no problem. But if we used ex. a RD1000 to backup the vmdks for the os(each time it's changed and stable) and for the data vmdks. How would we do that? We create snapshots of the vms to get a seperate vmdks to backup, but how do we copy it to the RD1000 disks? Can a VM on the ESXi get access to the vmdks-snapshots? How?

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It isn't going to happen. You would need a second server to do backups. You need physical control over that tape drive, the vm os does not support (to my knowledge). You would need windows server datacenter to be able to do what you want on one server, the host os could be used as the backup server but it does create a bit of overhead and more memory/harddrive space/processor may need to be spec'd for that. You can either backup the vms as if they were physical servers or you can back up with veeam.

BTW I checked yesterday on the 410, it has one expansion slot and a 4 port nic is available to purchase for it. So you could have 6 nic's(2 onboard, 4 on the expansion slot) and 1 Drac on the unit. This would give you your entry level vm server.

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It isn't going to happen. You would need a second server to do backups. You need physical control over that tape drive, the vm os does not support (to my knowledge). You would need windows server datacenter to be able to do what you want on one server, the host os could be used as the backup server but it does create a bit of overhead and more memory/harddrive space/processor may need to be spec'd for that. You can either backup the vms as if they were physical servers or you can back up with veeam.

BTW I checked yesterday on the 410, it has one expansion slot and a 4 port nic is available to purchase for it. So you could have 6 nic's(2 onboard, 4 on the expansion slot) and 1 Drac on the unit. This would give you your entry level vm server.

Nice. Yes, but with the 1 expansion slot, you wouldn't get RAID, right? Okey, so it's not possible to use the RD1000 for physical backup directly connected to the ESXi? You need a seperate computer like a desktop computer or something where the it manager would manually copy snapshot vmdks from esxi and then copy to rd1000 disks? I guess it's hard or expensive to get this automated.

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I believe it has a built in raid. I would just do a raid1 for the primary os (vmware os or windows server). You have a san right? So that would be your data drives.

As far as backups, yes, I have not seen a backup software that works natively with the vmware host os. It can be expensive depending on how you are doing it. The free hypervisor does not support sans so you would have to upgrade that to a paid license, windows isn't free so you would have to dish out money to them, backup software isn't free so you would have to up that too. IMO to do it on the cheap, use windows server to backup to a hard drive, not a tape. Hard drives are much cheaper than rdx media.

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Isn't RD1000 external hard drives? looked like it was external removable harddrives(with a single doc). We don't have SAN, trying to keep it as simple as possible. Hopefully just the production server(esxi) that would store everything. Wouldn't it be possible to have the rd1000 or other simple external harddrives connected to a desktop, make esxi run the ghettoVCB-script to make a snapshot and copy it to the desktop, where the it guy would copy onto the external harddrives in the morning(ghettoVCB running during the night)?

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