FreeNAS as a back end to a Citrix virtual server.

[netman4ttm]

A company I contract with has just landed a contract to repair a botched Citrix install.
The Citrix servers are running on 3 IBM x3550 m3's
Identical hardware
2 Core4 processors
36GB RAM
2 Broadcomm 1GB Ethernet ports
4 Intel 1GB Ethernet ports
2 Intel 32GB ssd drives mirrored.
1 Intel iSCSI Ethernet card

All Ethernet connections are cooper. Dedicated switch for data backend.

I don't know what san was supposed to run on this system. Just know that there were huge issues. SAN was returned, original contractor fired.

We tested a FreeNAS system (version 8 ) and had no problems with connecting to the servers. So we know in theory that it will work.

Our test bed was and old IBM 336 (I think thats the model number) with 12GB of RAM and a AMD Core2 processor. Used JBOD and had ZFS create a mirrored volume of just over 360GB of hard drive.

Has anyone had experience with FeeNAS or in the alternative IX-Systems http://www.ixsystems.com/ to know how reliable this system can be.

We will be running
8 Windows 2008 r2 servers
6 to 8 Windows7 desktops
4 XP (Windows for Legacy PCs) desktops
4 Debian 32bit servers, web, ftp, BIND
1 Debian 64bit server Asterisk (maybe)
1 Debian 64bit server MySQL (maybe)

[rah]

FreeNAS should be able to run just fine on that hardware as long as you have the proper packages/drivers installed. My only concern for you would be that it's not the most secure solution you could probably use. If the data isn't of any sensitive nature I'd say give it a try. If it is something you'd not rather have outside eyes seeing I would look for other alternatives.

Another point you might want to watch out for was that, at least on my old hardware, Raid kept failing. I was never able to get it stable enough to use. I'm no expert though, so I can't say it wasn't user error.