Alternatives to FreeNAS on the open internet?

[ovizii]

Hi everyone,

I've read a few discussions on this forum about this issue and most were quickly closed down. Let me quickly make my case:

I am planning a small vmware based project. This ESXi host will be run on a dedicated, hosted server. It is small and fast with little HD space but I need to back it up. All I can currently find is backupspace which either doesn't offer NFS or iSCSI so I can't connect it directly to my host. Even my hosting provider suggested I rent a cheap server and back up to it. (I can rent a 2nd server at the same provider and have both servers put into something like a virtual rack so the 2nd can only be reached from the 1st server).

The question is, does it make sense to you to install FreeNAS on the server providing the backups space? To me it seems logical, all it will ever do is provide iSCSI storage to the 1st server and (possibly) make use of the ZFS snapshot features.

I don't want to start a flame war here, I am simply looking for some pointers and alternative solutions if this is not suggested.

 

[Artion]

does it make sense to you to install freeNas on the server providing the backups space?

So the topic of the thread is more a "Can I use FN on a cloud virtualised server"?

 

[ovizii]

So the topic of the thread is more a "Can I use FN on a cloud virtualised server"?

Sorry for not being clear enough, let me clarify:

The question is:

Can I use FN on a dedicated cloud server and if your answer is NO, would it turn to YES if I network it in such a way so it is only accessible from 1 other server which will store its backups onto the FN server?