Using an HP Proliant DL380p Gen8 instead of a Thecus N12000Pro for NAS

[CougTek]

I want to store Hyper-V's virtual machines on a NAS. I originally planned to use a Thecus N12000PRO, but it only has 12x 3.5" bays to store the drives. Since I want to use 2.5" SSD, this is a waste of space. Something like and HP Proliant DL380p Gen8 would be better since I can use more drives. The hardware is comparable in price. I would have to configure an OS by myself instead of using Thecus' mature platform though.

What (ideally free) OS should I use to do this? I know there are OpenFiller and whatever replaced FreeNAS, but I don't know if they have the features I want. I need automatic replication between two NAS and some kind of failover feature: if one NAS craps, the other has to take over.

This doesn't depend on the OS, but I wish to use RAID 60 if it doesn't kill performances.

I know HP has very fine SAN solutions, but they are twice the price of my home-made project, even though they would use mecanical drives instead. So it's not the route I want to take.

 

[CougTek]

Some of the folks in that thread had some interesting things to write about a similar project, but the original poster wanted to use ESXi instead of Hyper-V.

 

[Mercutio]

I suspect you can get away with anything that does iSCSI, which FreeNAS certinly does. As a down side, you can't add zpools to an iSCSI share, so whatever size and storage configuration you use is what you're going to have unless you feel like bringing down and recreating the disk pools. From what I've read, OpenFiler does at least support Failover clusters and has strong iSCSI performance, so that's probably the first thing to investigate.