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HP StorageWorks P4300 SAN (Need software recommendations)

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Jacktivated

Technical User
Jan 25, 2014
1
US
Hi. I'm brand new to the forum and also to the storage world.

I've recently added an HP StorageWorks P4300 Storage Array iSCSI server to my home VMware/Cisco lab, which is still under construction, in the hopes of using it as a Home Network SAN to stream HD & Blu-Ray video to my HTPC and smaller video files to other devices (Laptop, tablet, etc), as well as for file storage, and eventually, remote access of some kind.

I was also hoping to use it for VM storage, though I'm wondering if I should keep the actual VMs residing on the local SAS drives, installed on the physical hosts.

We have an HP MSA-2000 and an EMC VNX-5300 Block at work, and I was hoping that by using my new SAN at home, it would help me to learn a lot more about storage, which I could apply to the workplace.

I purchased (2) 300GB 10K SAS drives & (4) 2TB Enterprise SATA drives and it has dual Quad-Core CPUs with 4GB Ram & a Raid controller card (Full details of my lab equipment is below).

I was originally planning to run FreeNas on a mini-itx or micro-atx home build, with RaidZ, ZFS, NFS. The guy I bought it from installed a fresh 180-day trial or Windows Server 2012 to the SAS drives, which are in a Raid-1, and the total of 8TB SATA is in Raid 5 at the moment.

THE ACTUAL QUESTION:
So, I guess I'm wondering if I should continue using Server 2012 on this and eventually purchasing a license or something, or is there is an open-source or free solution that would work even better, that would take full advantage of iSCSI, and something I could setup port-channel on with multiple NICs to increase my connection speeds and connect to a Cisco switch with Ether-Channel, etc?

I've also heard that FreeNas works better not utilizing a hardware Raid controller card.

Sorry this is so verbose. I wanted to be as thorough as possible to get the best advice.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you very much, in advance!


The lab consists of:
(1) HP StorageWorks P4300 Storage Array iSCSI server (AMD Opteron QC 2.3GHz Processor & 4GB Ram)
(1) HP Proliant DL360 G5 (Dual Quad-Core 3.0 GHz Xeon Processors & 16GB Ram)
(1) Dell PowerEdge R715 (Dual 12-Core 1.9GHz Opteron Processors & 32GB Ram)
(2) 2950, (2)3550 Cisco switches
(2) 1841, (2)2811 Cisco routers
(1) Cisco ASA 5505 (Firewall)
 
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