As mentioned in title I am looking for an OS that will run on an old Dell R710 server. Ive already installed the hard drives and gave it a RAID 50 configuration. The Dell website has a list of all OS’s but it doesnt mention open source solutions. I am worried about vulnerabilities and the ability to STIG it to our specifications after its scanned. I was hoping that freenas would be compatible since it is an old server. My contract is stingy. The OS’s supported on Dells websites are
*BIOS
Citrix XenServer 5
Citrix XenServer 5.6
Citrix XenServer 6.0
Citrix XenServer 6.1
Citrix XenServer 6.2
Citrix XenServer 6.5
Novell SuSE Linux ES 10
Novell SuSE Linux ES 11
Red Hat® Ent Linux 4
Red Hat® Ent Linux 4.5
Red Hat® Ent Linux 4.6
Red Hat® Ent Linux 4.7
Red Hat® Ent Linux 5
Red Hat® Ent Linux 5.2
Red Hat® Ent Virtual3
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 4.5
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 6
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 7
Red Hat® Linux 6.2
Red Hat® Linux 7.0
Sun Solaris
Suse Linux ES 10
SUSE Linux ES 12
VMware ESX
VMware ESX 3.5
VMware ESX 4.0
VMware ESX 4.1
VMware ESXi 3.5
VMware ESXi 4.0
VMware ESXi 4.1
VMware ESXi 5.0
VMware ESXi 5.1
VMware ESXi 5.5
VMware ESXi 6.0
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003 x64
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008 x64
Windows Server 2008 x86
Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2012 R2
I started configuring Redhat Linux 7 but my boss said no since its coming to end of life. Do you think that it will be compatible? How easy is it to harden it to Department of Defense security requirements? How well does it integrate with a windows environment?
Hey, thanks for posting, and welcome to the forums! I think TrueNAS is potentially a viable option for this project. We have a lot of deployments on air-gapped networks within the DoD and IC space. We’re working on some software changes that will make the Enterprise version of TrueNAS STIG-able against the GPOS STIG. We can also support FIPS 140-2 and -3 validated crypto if that is a requirement.
How much capacity is required? Do you need full support for the system, or are you comfortable building it and maintaining it on your own?
I am comfortable building on own with occasional questions answered and persepectivesw given. Is it true that I would have to get rid of the hardware RAID? I have maxed out the Dell R710 Data requirements with 6 2 TB Hard Drives. After RAID deployment Im coming in at 8 TB of space. I need redundancy. Even though the docs I’m trying to move from our operational share to this archive haven’t been touched in 5 years or more the engineers have made it very clear they want nothing erased. SO I added a RAID 50 to give it redundancy and maxing out the disk space.
ZFS is a software RAID implementation so if you use hardware RAID either in addition to or instead of using ZFS, you’ll be missing out on many of ZFS’ core benefits. You can implement something conceptually very similar to a RAID50 by using RAIDZ1. In your case, you would have 2x RAIDZ1 vdevs (or RAID sets) of 4 disks each. ZFS stripes the two vdevs together to give you the ~8TB of space.
Note that if you do go down the TrueNAS route, you’ll want to put your hardware RAID card into IT mode so it acts as a dumb SAS controller rather than a RAID controller.
Since this is a legacy end of life dell server (R710) I am worried about compatibility with TrueNAS. Since you have provided awesome answers (Thank you), can you let me know what version you would use if you were to do this project? Should I go legacy RealNAS? It just has to provide one single shared file on the network and work seamlessly with a windows environment.
