All my workload is in Linux. Should I still run freenas?

[SillyPosition]

HI everyone,
I in the process of building a new Nas device
I'm a long time qnap user with quite a big stack of 8-10 services, which I run as docker containers.
I'm a big fan of docker and know it very well so it's working good for me.
However, of course, I want ZFS and got here. I can understand the big excitement about freenas but wonder if it suits my needs as if I'm to run freenas os on my Nas, I will most probably need to always have a quite fat and resource demanding Linux vm for running all my stuff.
Is it practical? I'll have a quite strong cpu and worst case can upgrade to Xeon, and will start off with 16gb ram so I'll probably be capable for it, I just wonder if it's the right path.
I know about jails but for me as everything is already configured and working well, and...trutg be told I'm a Linux guy, not much familiar with bsd, I rather stay with a Linux stack

I'll appreciate your opinions about this situation.
Thanks!

 

[danb35]

Well, if you want a ZFS-based NAS, AFAIK, your options are limited to FreeNAS and FreeNAS NAS4Free XigmaNAS, both of which run on FreeBSD. ZFS on Linux, AIUI, is stable and works well, but none of the Linux NAS distros are using it.

Jails work well on FreeNAS; I don't have any personal experience using it as a VM host (both Proxmox and xcp-ng seem to do better in that regard). If you were running everything on the FreeNAS box anyway, and the software will run under FreeBSD, you'll almost certainly see better performance by running those apps in jails.

 

[KrisBee]

IMO, If your are committed to docker I suspect you'd be happier using a Linux base, rather than relying on a bhyve VM in FN. Your 16gb of RAM etc will go further and you will not be reliant on internal virtual network for mounting pool data inside docker containers via NFS or CIFS.

In Linux, you will not get zfs on root, boot environments, trim support of SSD and all the FN web stuff which helps to easily manage pools/disk and automate snapshots, scrubs, emails etc. Nor will you get the ease of running FreeNAS from a sub stick (although ssd is favoured now) and saving config/restoring FN config. So its CLI, or using one or more of the scripts around to do much of that in Linux. Debian based Openmediavault might be worth a look as it handles docker well and does have a zfs plugin for basic pool/dataset/snapshot managemnt. But it's debatable if you want to have docker using zfs as its storage driver, so on OMV the split between OS and data disks needs thought. Other than that the blog entries at https://blog.linuxserver.io/ give plenty of ideas, starting with https://blog.linuxserver.io/2016/02/02/the-perfect-media-server-2016/ onwards.

If your 8-10 services can be run in jails, as @danb35 says, that ought to be the recommended solution.