Bear in mind, ixSystems HAS an enterprise solution based on FreeNAS called TrueNAS - we bought two appliances with 72TB if usable storage to handle image storage for our ECM suite which has BILLIONS of small images. The things run like a champ, and outside some minor issues with the AD integration we've taken care of they've been a great storage solution.
I've been using FreeNAS 9.10 for just under a year now having originally moved from Ubuntu Server. Its feature set, ease of use and stability really is incredible. Can't wait to try Corral out.
I'm excited to see FreeNAS "Corral" come out and the user interface looks great, however I'm still disappointed that jails are not able to be used.
I'm not sad to see the plugins system gone, it was terrible and I always set up my own custom jails on FreeNAS anyway, but It would have been nice to be able to use jails at least from the command line. I guess they don't want to have to worry about supporting both.
I just wonder about the extra overhead of having to run a virtual machine for every container as opposed to just running a FreeBSD jail. bhyve is also not as established as FreeBSD jails and I wonder about stability. Now you're having to worry about the stability of bhyve and docker. For just running services like emby, syncthing, SABnzbd or the like I honestly think having the option to just run a FreeBSD jail is superior. Considering it is FreeBSD under the hood I don't see why the option is gone.
It's nice to be able to run Docker containers don't get me wrong, but I just wonder if it is really the superior technology.
Does anyone know of a way to configure FreeNAS (or an alternative FS, such LizardFS or Tahoe LAFS) that can provide the feature set of Isilon OneFS (not the performance) with an open source implementation?
That is,
1. to add more storage, just add another machine (everything looks like one big volume, irrespective of machine/disk boundaries).
2. replication / error correction / raid works across the entire fleet of machines; that is, you can configure it so that up to 1-disk per node, and up to 2-nodes overall can die without damage to data
1. Not sure how to get a single global namespace on FreeNAS right now, that might require further upgrades to NFS (or maybe it's in 10 now, I haven't tried).
2. Early in the development of FreeNAS 10 SwiftStack, IPFS, and Riak were planned as features. It's still possible those will make it into the project some day, but for now you're on your own for clustering/multi-node use.
What is the status of ipfs integration? I know it was part of the v10 roadmap, but I don't see any mention of it in Corral and have been unable to figure out if it features in the Corral roadmap. Corral looks like it would be a great UX for farming disk space for ipfs/filecoin in the future. Thanks.
Is it possible to run Windows 10 as guest in Bhyve? I was planning to build my workstation on Ubuntu as host OS. Running few VMs inside - two windows, two linux and managing my ZFS pool (host os directly)... but if FreeNAS can run Windows VMs, it would be ideal...
They've always had the functionality to run software like Transmission inside a Jail. I guess they just moved that functionality to docker to be more "hip".
You can set up email notifications to have your server email you when new updates are available. They come out semi-frequently; maybe monthly. You can install them from the web interface pretty easily; major updates usually require a reboot.
By default I think the only way to access FreeNAS is through the web interface (which seems fairly secure, though I'm not really all that familiar with FreeNAS's codebase). No SSL by default, but you can set it up with self-signed certs almost trivially using FreeNAS's GUI. You can enable SSH access and other services manually, and those services come with their own set of security concerns you need to be aware of.
You can't? I thought there was a Crashplan plugin? (Also, even if you can't run it on BSD, couldn't you just setup a VirtualBox jail and run Crashplan on that?)
Yes, you can put drives of similar sizes in raid groups ("vdevs") together and then stripe together dissimilar groups. You can also put them all together in one big group, but in that case the group will act as though all the drives are the size of the smallest one and waste the rest of the space.
Example disks:
* 2x 500GB
* 4x 1TB
Example of first option:
* Mirror of 500GB: 500GB
* RAID-Z of 1TB: 3TB
* Total Usable Storage: 3.5TB
* Total Overhead (Redundancy): 1.5TB
* Pool fails if any two drives of the same size are lost
Example of second option:
* RAID-Z1 of all: 2.5TB (Effectively RAID-Z1 of 6x500TB)
* Total Usable Storage: 2.5TB
* Total Overhead (Redundancy): 500TB
* Total Wasted: 2TB
* Pool fails if any two drives are lost
Terminology/facts in case any reader doesn't know:
* A mirror is what you'd think, basically RAID 1.
* A RAID-Z(1) is a RAID group with a single disk worth of
redundancy, like RAID 5.
* RAID-Z2 and RAID-Z3 are two- and three-disk redundancy
groups respectively.
* ZFS can stripe together any number of similar or dissimilar groups of drives, but if any one such group is lost the entire pool is corrupted.
Edited for formatting
Edit Edit: These behaviors are due to ZFS, not choices made by the FreeNAS developers.
The answer is complicated. ZFS wasn't designed with a small number of heterogeneous drive sizes in mind.
If you don't care about redundancy then you can span a volume across as many odd drives as you want free and clear.
If you do care about redundancy, you need sets of similar drives put together and then it only makes sense if you have a large number of drives.
Raidz has performance penalties and should only be used with a large number of vdevs unless you care little about speed.
An array of mirrors is the best way to go for small to medium sized zfs installations which means pairs of same-sized drives and only 50% available space.
The ideal case would be to get a new ZFS system and copy over the network. Depending on how big your data is, and how many spare drives you have, you could probably do something hacky like creating a small ZFS pool on linux, empty a btrfs drive, and then move it over to ZFS. At that point you could export that system and switch over to FreeNAS. But the end result wouldn't be optimal, pretty far from it.
edit: just to clarify ZFS under Linux isn't hacky, ubuntu 16.04 makes it pretty nice, rather this particular suggestion is hacky.
Btrfs is in the Linux kernel. FreenNAS is BSD, not Linux based. You can of course rsync the data from one system to the other over a network cable; and you can also use -c,--checksum option to do checksum verification (super slow but if you care enough to use Btrfs and ZFS you care about data integrity presumably).
I doubt FreeBSD can read btrfs volumes directly; however if they let you set up a fully virtualized VM (i.e. appears like its own hardware and you could install Windows under it), then you could create the correct sized VM, install your OS, then migrate.
[+] [-] lisnake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snuxoll|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ajedi32|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shad0wca7|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnramsden|9 years ago|reply
I'm not sad to see the plugins system gone, it was terrible and I always set up my own custom jails on FreeNAS anyway, but It would have been nice to be able to use jails at least from the command line. I guess they don't want to have to worry about supporting both.
I just wonder about the extra overhead of having to run a virtual machine for every container as opposed to just running a FreeBSD jail. bhyve is also not as established as FreeBSD jails and I wonder about stability. Now you're having to worry about the stability of bhyve and docker. For just running services like emby, syncthing, SABnzbd or the like I honestly think having the option to just run a FreeBSD jail is superior. Considering it is FreeBSD under the hood I don't see why the option is gone.
It's nice to be able to run Docker containers don't get me wrong, but I just wonder if it is really the superior technology.
[+] [-] X86BSD|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beagle3|9 years ago|reply
Does anyone know of a way to configure FreeNAS (or an alternative FS, such LizardFS or Tahoe LAFS) that can provide the feature set of Isilon OneFS (not the performance) with an open source implementation?
That is,
1. to add more storage, just add another machine (everything looks like one big volume, irrespective of machine/disk boundaries).
2. replication / error correction / raid works across the entire fleet of machines; that is, you can configure it so that up to 1-disk per node, and up to 2-nodes overall can die without damage to data
3. snapshots
[+] [-] Fzzr|9 years ago|reply
2. Early in the development of FreeNAS 10 SwiftStack, IPFS, and Riak were planned as features. It's still possible those will make it into the project some day, but for now you're on your own for clustering/multi-node use.
3. Snapshots and Snapshot Replication are a core feature of FreeNAS since 8. I don't know where the 10 docs are but in 9.10 they're here: http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#snapshots
[+] [-] urza|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captasparagus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fzzr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] urza|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pat2man|9 years ago|reply
Synology has lots of "apps" that run on their NAS solution: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/app_packages/all_app. This could easily cover that use case.
[+] [-] lykron|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsnedders|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ajedi32|9 years ago|reply
By default I think the only way to access FreeNAS is through the web interface (which seems fairly secure, though I'm not really all that familiar with FreeNAS's codebase). No SSL by default, but you can set it up with self-signed certs almost trivially using FreeNAS's GUI. You can enable SSH access and other services manually, and those services come with their own set of security concerns you need to be aware of.
[+] [-] mrbill|9 years ago|reply
I've got hardware built up but am still debating NAS4FREE vs FreeNAS.
[+] [-] justinclift|9 years ago|reply
Haven't tried the released version of Corral though, so unsure if it's carried through.
[+] [-] Fzzr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abrookewood|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tw04|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ajedi32|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] defgeneric|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrpippy|9 years ago|reply
https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/linux-crashplan/
[+] [-] X86BSD|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmarreck|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] littleboxes|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fzzr|9 years ago|reply
Example disks:
* 2x 500GB
* 4x 1TB
Example of first option:
* Mirror of 500GB: 500GB
* RAID-Z of 1TB: 3TB
* Total Usable Storage: 3.5TB
* Total Overhead (Redundancy): 1.5TB
* Pool fails if any two drives of the same size are lost
Example of second option:
* RAID-Z1 of all: 2.5TB (Effectively RAID-Z1 of 6x500TB)
* Total Usable Storage: 2.5TB
* Total Overhead (Redundancy): 500TB
* Total Wasted: 2TB
* Pool fails if any two drives are lost
Terminology/facts in case any reader doesn't know:
* A mirror is what you'd think, basically RAID 1.
* A RAID-Z(1) is a RAID group with a single disk worth of redundancy, like RAID 5.
* RAID-Z2 and RAID-Z3 are two- and three-disk redundancy groups respectively.
* ZFS can stripe together any number of similar or dissimilar groups of drives, but if any one such group is lost the entire pool is corrupted.
Edited for formatting
Edit Edit: These behaviors are due to ZFS, not choices made by the FreeNAS developers.
[+] [-] colechristensen|9 years ago|reply
If you don't care about redundancy then you can span a volume across as many odd drives as you want free and clear.
If you do care about redundancy, you need sets of similar drives put together and then it only makes sense if you have a large number of drives.
Raidz has performance penalties and should only be used with a large number of vdevs unless you care little about speed.
An array of mirrors is the best way to go for small to medium sized zfs installations which means pairs of same-sized drives and only 50% available space.
[+] [-] machbio|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] noja|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terribledactyl|9 years ago|reply
edit: just to clarify ZFS under Linux isn't hacky, ubuntu 16.04 makes it pretty nice, rather this particular suggestion is hacky.
[+] [-] cmurf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nfriedly|9 years ago|reply
http://rockstor.com/
[+] [-] patrickg_zill|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davemtl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdekkers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|9 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.freenas.org/blog/introducing-freenas-corral-an-op...
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rustynails|9 years ago|reply
The system requirements are still 8gb RAM and 8gb disk minimum.
There are no details of the performance.
Release notes are here.
https://download.freenas.org/Corral/RELEASE/ReleaseNotes.txt