TrueNASX10 Hardware & TrueNAS Software Review

[Music] so excited today because we're gonna be reviewing this true NASA x10 box now I'm breaking a video up into two parts this is going to be all about what true NASA is how it differs from FreeNAS the hardware that is the x10 system and some of the unique features that it has and they go to the other hand in hand so let's say you want to build a FreeNAS box there's plenty of guides that I've talked about this before and there's you know you can use it on consumer hardware enterprise hardware it's very diverse works on a lotta different platforms but true NASA's along with this box here's ix systems got the shirt on today they completely designed the hardware and the software together so true nasa is a not a fork of free Nass it is a taking the best enterprise-level features that are designed for the enterprise market which was this boxes and integrating them into this so it gets developed alongside FreeNAS they look at the highest availability parts the most reliable parts of free-dance such as a ZFS file system and other features that are in it and of course they interface a lot of us are familiar with the FreeNAS and integrate them in here they don't integrate some of the things like you know the Plex plugin because not as likely that you're going to be running Plex oddness in the enterprise market it's generally designed for high availability and redundant storage but nonetheless we're gonna get into some of the details here how the hardware works know this has dual motherboards and dual power supplies and the motherboards are part of the genius of the way they did this so they have two completely separate modules here we're gonna open them up and show you how this looks and when it does this is for failover now what's even more magical is how they've got both motherboards simultaneously talking to all the SATA drives I'm sorry now SATA SAS drives that are in here so you have a row of SAS drives in here and both motherboards can see them at the same time and synchronize with each other so this is a really neat feature of the way this is designed so let's spin the box around and we'll start at the back and work to the front the Front's obviously pretty simple is for the drives go but let's start at the back and show you where some of the magic is on this alright so we got the box spun around and let's do a quick rundown of the ports now module a module B they're completely symmetrical so we have two standard gigabit ports two USBs one installed with FreeNAS I'm sorry true Nass but this is the Installer not the one it runs off of so you can run FreeNAS off of a USB and that's how a lot of people do it matter of fact it'll even support redundant USBs but what they've done here is they have the installer and then inside here will now show you inside they have it running on a m2 SATA so we have the two USBs here this is the out-of-band management port so this for out-of-band management kind of looks like a headphone jack and so this connects to here and then here is the dedicated out-of-band port and once again it's symmetrical so you have this on both sides then we have your SAS externals so if you wanted to use this as the head end and then plug in more drives and once again symmetrical over here then you can connect to more drives so this can be the head end then you have several more boxes underneath of it with piles of hard drives inside of them and that's the configuration support about this dual expansion boxes are supported on this model I believe some of the higher-end models have even more expansion beyond that so they shipped it to us with two rj45 ten gigabit ports in here this is your low-profile card it's essentially a PCIe they have other configuration options you can get it with such as sfp+ so once again contact your rep and they can get you the right ones now the hardware itself is really nicely put together and also if you don't want to use out-of-band over IP the ipmi they have a little spot right here where you can plug in a headphone jack and they give you a headphone jack with a usb on it so this is so you can do your own counsel so you can plug into here and it's pretty long these four foot five foot cable here but if you didn't want to do ipmi for some reason this was in the box as well back to the hardware really easy to get to everything except one minor annoyance if you're using cables that are like this with a little boot and a stopper right here so they don't eject easy I can get to the bottom of these pine but an ipmi my finger doesn't fit under here real well I mean it's a pretty minor complaint you can wiggle it out but you know I guess I got to find something wrong so I'm so happy with it overall that's my one complaint I have is it's a little hard to get the network jack out of here but the reality is once you install these in your data center you're not likely to be pulling the network cables out all day but just note you do that now it's because of the way this is recessed over and when you pull it out it's actually easy to get out too so generally once you plug these in like I said you're not unplugging and re-plugging now let's start with a power supply though about how it comes apart so you get this little orange lever here and we give it a push to release it and just as smooth as can be power supply will slide right out and they've got it well fitted so the power supply also contains the fans for airflow we have this here so we have air coming in through the front and then air coming in across the top here to create the airflow and that actually goes in to pull the air flow through the motherboard the power supplies got nice guides on it really just it's heavy and efficient so these are well rated you know with modern equipment you really want efficiency because well electricity is you know not a cheap thing it's a big expense at the data center span with electricity so it slips in really nice so when you pushing it in you can't just push the whole unit in there's a stopper hips right here with that stopper does is keep you from just jamming it in wrong and then you slowly lever it up and fits in nice snug secure and clicks and locks so you can't accidentally the power supply now on to the motherboard this is really cool to lift a lever I mean you could pull and you see it pushes on this lever a little bit but you lift this lever and pull these and it gently slides out the motherboard and the way it comes out now back to the venting you seen on the power supply there's the venting here so the air comes through and pulls down and this right here prevents the air from getting pulled back in so it keeps nice directional airflow coming through the unit the hardware on this I mean this is well engineered it fits really well these little Clips here these aren't plastic or chintzy at all this is really solid this is metal and so they have nice they have stops so they won't go too far so when you pull them out you don't have to try and find the sweet spot to slide this back in they come they hit they grab these little matches on each either side and it pulls it in the rest of the way and here's the connectors on the other side so once again metal guide here then all the connectors should connect all the bus and everything else also let's slide this out of the way the design itself is toolless so to perform any upgrade functions trust these two blue buttons like magic we're in inside the board itself once you're inside we have your standard memory here we have our PCI card for the extra add-in for Network so obviously it's you know PCIe so it's easy enough to you know find other adapters for this I mean they're gonna ship you with what you want but it's interchangeable so that if something goes wrong with this card there probably two sends you a whole new module but it's modular itself we have the Intel processor under here this unit shipped with an Intel 1531 at 2.2 gigahertz so plenty of power if you're using this for encryption or anything else which I highly recommend using encrypted arrays that way when arrays go bad you don't have to rebuy the data item also if you can look down in here and I'm not gonna remove anything I'm just demoing the hardware but right there we have an m2 SATA SanDisk 128 that's actually what this boots off of is the SanDisk and runs now they have the USB in here I believe just to reload it so it's probably got a copy of the operating system on there and then this is actually what it moves off of so you have a nice solid boot device inside of here it's pretty much the hardware inside here really nicely designed really clean and I like that this tool is just simple click and you're done can we slide it back in it clicks and you're back in business it's really impressive to me how they've done the interconnects between these because both of them can see all the hard drives all the time for the high availability so you have this even if this fails and you have to get a replacement module there's not downtime to replace it it is made to be pulled out I was told you can pull them out live and it's not obviously recommended it's for emergency situations because of the amperage these use you could scar up the terminals if you did this frequently and hopefully with most time you know generally hardware doesn't feel that often these are all the just in case scenarios so let's spin it around and take a look at the hard drives so here's the drives in them and their standard nice trays slide out now the trays are not to list there are screws holding the drives in but this is actually a preferred method because you want that precision and some of the tooless ones are cool but I've had to fiddle with them a little like you put them in you fiddle with the drive and then it goes in because they've got these on the side here the little tension clips so when these tribes go in there perfect there's no fiddling or moving them around now over here we've got SSDs in here so here's the tray for the SSDs and these are going to be for part of the testing we're do will show you how you can set up a cache and as ill on these but this for the SSDs two trays slightly different to accommodate so the trays themselves are not universal and if you have blanks like you don't have a hard drive in here to keep the air flow Universal you end up with a standard blank one which no holder for hard drive on it that's so if you took one of these drives out or if you have a unit that you didn't order with all the drives filled they're gonna come fill them with blanks that look just like the other ones and you have that on there so you also have a little writing tab right here so you can maybe put coordinates or information you're also right here these ones because they ship them in separate boxes these ones also say HDD on them but then there's a spot here so we can see and put you know little stickers inside of here that's what these are is actually a little sticker spots so pretty select pretty clean looking interface on there plus they have the rows labeled 0 3 4 7 8 11 because the unit can tell you which drive it is in cross reference set and then we have the lights over here on the side which it has a light to let you know if there's a problem and a green like to let you know that it's on now they also do ship these with rails and everything else so you can mount this and have it on a rail system it slides in and out that's also another option it comes with all right so let's get this thing powered on and I know the question people ask is how loud is it now ideally these are going to be in a data center probably not sitting next to your desk but on you know you may have concerns of just how loud and the really concern is how many watts does it use so I have the trusty kilowatt now they rated their power supplies on the spec sheet they said they are 90% efficient I believe it cuz this thing's actually doesn't pull the ton of watts for how much how many hard drives and the build of the machine so let's get it plugged in I'm gonna leave the microphone exactly how it is so you can hear how loud it is and we'll talk about how many watts it's using [Applause] so we started out 140 watts we just hit 300 watts for the spin up which you heard and now we're coming all the way down to 220 watts as its booting up so it's kind of settled on about 220 right now and we've left this plugged in before when we were doing some setup testing with it and it seems to stay in the couple hundred watt range obviously a lot of the wattage is pulled by the hard drives up here CPUs idle fairly efficiently and whether or not under high load high use but yeah it's not pulling a ton of watch right now so it's it's pretty reasonable on power maybe we'll do some testing when we put it under load to see how much that goes up when we're loading it up but I don't think you're gonna see a dramatic change between them in the and the wattage for this other than when it's under full load with if these are not 15k drives but if you in all lips like 15k drives that you're only Korell more wattage so you're gonna see some of that actually it's now it should be checking the drives I can't see what they're starting a blink or not it just jumped up to like 260 Watts enough about the power it's not the most fascinating thing about this but it's good to know that they put some time into making very efficient power supplies that means another side note even with these guys running and all that not a lot of heat it does not it's not like sitting behind some of the other servers but we have an older server that we for one of our clients it's like a blow dryer behind it all the time some of the older ones are very inefficient and they dissipate a lot of heat this is obviously really modern hardware so thermal concerns have been addressed in it okay so we talked about all the hardware and let's talk about what's different about the software now true nasa versus freeness as i said this is a very optimized version of freenas specifically for the hardware so you have the people engineering the hardware working hand-in-hand with people designing this particular flavor of FreeNAS now here's my FreeNAS machine here's trueness FreeNAS true NASA logo is different couple more options over here we're going to talk about that so it really has that familiar interface so we go to storage I have a storage pool set here we go to my storage I have a lot more storage pools but you get this idea they're very much the same as far as most of your functionality so if you are used to using freenas true NASA's really not much of a learning curve but there's a few extra things in here so let's first talk about true nos being that it's Enterprise designed with the enterprise if you work in that level you want really good support not just uptime uptime is a really big factor in deciding Harbor but so is having support and this is something pretty cool that they've built in so before we get all the HEA stuff we'll run across some of these tools here tunable z' they come pre tuned this is something that you're gonna get from the tune ass people they enable the auto-tune because they understand the hardware very very well and can optimize it specifically for the configurations that you're getting shipped so when you order it they build it they ship it it's all configured now couple notes here they do not ship it in H a mode I guess you could ask them to if you wanted to if you gave them the very specifics about your network but the way they shipped it to me was they shifted me I got it on the network and then one of their technicians because you get a technician with this doesn't come in a box but he'll do remote support and help you you get one of their engineers to set this up so they were amazing I spent some time gonna follow them doing a lot of QA and learning some of the details because I was you don't want to dive in deep behind the scenes with this so I wanted to understand how it was working so I could share that with you so it shipped without a che and I got to watch the HEA process now they like to help you with a che that's part of the package and please let them help you because you can make mistakes when you're doing this and put the machine in a non bootable mode essentially the storage all that looks much the same but these have a couple different options so we have the two doubles and then we have over here the failover which is sync from peer sync to peer save set your timeout options these are to give some expanded options for your timeout between the two boards for failover --zz the default seemed to work fine but they do have a couple clients with some really unusual this is a really cool thing here and Anna enable automatic alerts to eye system and it's just a checkbox based on the support level you have that's pretty cool and the reason this is nice is because yes you still get your notices here and you can still have an email you notices and all the usual things that you have with FreeNAS plus the proactive support and this they've told me I said how does it work in production as always how I like to ask things and they said well we've actually called clients numerous times because you know as IT people may have job hopped or changed the notice goes to an email address that someone didn't notice or bob is who got it before and now say Lee has the job and Bob's email address is dead so then they don't get the notice when the problem occurs when you have this enabled they don't they get the notice and when they get the notice they're like hey Drive XYZ failed and now we're ready to ship you out another one so that this practice support if you don't have IT people that are checking their emails and things like that they can get everything ready it automatically opens a ticket and they contact you and they're ready for the replacements so if you are on vacation as an IT guy they're still working behind the scenes to help you and this is a really cool feature for these two proactive support and so they're engineers have information on it as I said before it's just Intel Xeon CPU D now here's a couple things about how h.a works inside of here they're using the BSD carp system and by doing that I only ever have to change everything on this one virtual IP and I see virtual IP this is the IP that you want to attach all your shares to the IP essentially for the system but the way carp works there's more than one now you don't require any special networking hardware to have carp working so here's dot 245 here is 247 these are the individual nodes themselves and anything I change here or here because this is the active node just so I can see it automatically syncs over to the inactive node because they use standby mode for a chase so the two are powered up but it's only in a so to speak a read-only standby mode so it tells you the active IP it tells you that it's on standby it tells you a chaise enabled here so everything ready this thing is ready to fly but it's not active and what happens is if this node goes down at 2:45 it right now at about six second intervals it's checking so if this nodes not up it immediately jumps over to the other node now side note if something goes really wrong in here they also will force a kernel panic to shut this one down and move to the other one you see rimy of the eye I think we used to pronounce this stone ax sto and is shoot the other node in the head which was from bailiff clusters in earlier days of Linux H a which was how you got rid of a rogue one you would just shoot it in a head as they used to say so I always thought that was kind of funny and that's with this with the networking and everything else it's watching for the network and the interfaces and determining whether or not this node needs to be up or if this node needs to be up so it's constantly checking but effectively you just do everything at one IP address and you don't have to know now you're gonna get a notice if one of the nodes codes down you just aren't gonna experience any downtime which of course is the ultimate goal so each one of these machines are sitting here now what about doing updates that's interesting I was asking about that and when you do the system updates first this the updates for this are not as frequent as they are for free answer very strongly tested they are very much more focused and only the enterprise level stops so they're really highly focused on stability and the nice thing is when you're doing an update for this because it's their hardware they have you know each one of these engineers are have one of these in their labs so they're testing everything thoroughly before they send you the update so you don't have to worry about oh no will this update break anything I have because of some unique hardware configuration they do the testing internally for that but the updates worked the same as they do but because you're running to old nodes when you run the update I'm actually updating the other node not this one and in Vice first it's gonna switch back and forth between them and so you update each node it comes up and then you can do the switch overs so you can update with zero downtime and I think that's kind of neat if an update goes awry you'd only end up with one node down and so you could work on a solution to that versus you know taking the system down because of an update so I kind of like the way they did that the way it automatically does that so another question make came up might come up and this is something I found really clever as well so this H a journal file that's under the data folder is actually a journal of any changes you may make while the other node is rebooting so if I forced a node failure and then also while that note is in fail mode but rebooting it creates a journal of any changes to shares the storage controller anything you're changing inside of true Nass and what it's doing is getting ready to sync that so soon as the other node comes up because here's all the changes to sync them that's what keeps the nodes in sync now that's also for some reason that doesn't work why they have this failover option where you can force the syncing going back the other way if you needed to I haven't done too much other than the general plugging unplugging stuff we're going to do a whole separate video showing the redundancy of this but I've never had to use the actual sync one and I have simulated some changes and like I said when we get into the failure mode reviews of this as a separate video I'll show you how that works but novel the way they did it now another thing you may notice here is I wonder how they talk to each other well I know it's a lot just dumped on the screen right here but I'll highlight the part that's interesting this is a network card the that mean you don't see so n TB so you have your IX and I GBS over here so we're gonna go over to networking interfaces and there's those but what you don't have is the other one here that I'm showing because what these are and we did some speed tests between here the N TB is a bus network for carp so it's actually not using to synchronize the two systems it's not using the interfaces that are on the back of it it has another internal interface for the two nodes to talk to each other this is rather clever and we did some speed testing and it's like a 40 gigabit link between there so it's really impressive just how much speed we got doing speed test with iperf between air and so that's how fast it can sync back and forth and this is also for handing off when a node fails that can hand off to the other node or especially when you're doing it controlled like an update you're handing off to the other node this is part of what makes that so fast and allows these both these controllers to stay in sync with all of the drives at once this is how the nodes talk to each other on the back end and I guess that's really important because you don't want the network interfaces in the back to be cluttered up with any of the management inter carp information that has to go back and forth between them so this is it's this comes pre-configured with units this is how the units the Sims talk to each other so let's get onto some of the other differences now you probably noticed let's go back over to my free Ness box so go here is there are jails I have in mind still from doing the upgrade there's a plugins option so we can plug in things and like I said you are missing some of that here you don't get all the plugins jails are not currently on the feature set that this has maybe it's something they'll add in a future but it's nothing to have right now generally in the enterprise market I mean this is a dedicated part of your storage sand and the back in your server office not something that you want to run Plex on or a bunch of other plugins but when it comes to services for example muscles are all synced DNS domain controller I scuzzy LDAP rsync still has s3 storage on here so you can have some of the Amazon features SMBs psssssh web dev and UPS controls in the services and a sharing is ice cozy windows WebDAV unix apple so you have the same feature sets there in terms of all the file functionality in true nass just like you have in freeness the active directory services and as you can see look the same between shrew and ass and freenas so you still have the same functionality in there I also love school they left the wizard in both of them so you still have the setup wizard the setup wizard doesn't cover h-hey I was curious if you did it did not so that syllable is the call to attack to get that done now another thing that you have is the vCenter plugin this is something rather new and it's not fully developed they've thrown it in here and seen how many their clients really want to use it and they're going to do for their development but what this actually will allow you to do is use vCenter to work directly with it so you can actually create the drives inside of recenter instead of logging into the true dance box and it will create the drives for you I believe it creates the I scuzzy lunge for that not an expert's I don't run any of the ESX things so I'm not a vCenter expert but they said this is something they're working on developing they have it as a can create but cannot destroy drives which is probably good that way if anything goes wrong with the interface but this is an active plug-in that they're working on that does come in here now decide not about true Nass it has also been certified to work with both ESX Microsoft hyper-v and Citrix XenServer so they have done testing they did see the majority of their clients are running ESXi with this in the backend but they've done testing with these so once again when they take out of the code from FreeNAS they focus on these enterprise features and I believe they got some certifications that they've went through with these companies to make sure that they also are really good at support because they're supporting so many other companies if you're using one of those configurations they're really helpful at getting at helping you get that set up and of course like I said ESX being king and dominant of the virtualization world there are really familiar with that particular system and these are a really popular solution they have clients with petabytes of storage with these and you know no problems they work really well and it's a popular piece of hardware so I hope you enjoyed this introduction to the tune and kind of show you that in between the two nos and FreeNAS and review of this tune sx-10 hardware the separate video is going to be us actually showing this in action so I can tell you all these cool h.a features but we'll do separate videos that are just on showing how resilient this system is and tolerant to fault such and removing power supplies or even a node coming out of it wallets on and you know making sure that failover works and having machines attached to it so we can actually see the entire mode so if you like to count here like I've described if you have certain questions post them in the comments below and also if you have some specific things you want me to test on this I more than happy you guys help inspired me to do some of these videos and give me suggestions for things you want to see your questions and concerns and we've got this thing for a little bit longer and we're gonna be doing some of those tests all right thanks likes accountant here like and subscribe appreciate it

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 30,197

Keywords: TrueNAS, FreeNAS, TrueNASX10, ixsystems, nas, network attached storage, freebsd, storage, zfs, freenas (software), truenas, technology, hardware

Id: TgyYU6wuIgk

Length: 28min 8sec (1688 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/haptizum]

We just got a TrueNAS Z30 with an expansion shelve. It's got 64TB in a stripped/mirror for our XenServer cluster. Their support is second to none as well.