FreeNas Mini - bought 2 and sending back

[ShaneFre]

Hi all... I bought two FreeNas mini’s and as soon as they arrived I didn’t even unpack them. I sent them back. My friend helping me (in his spare time) said it won’t be powerful enough to run VM’s and we want to run a VM as an email server as well. Since his time is limited can I get one already built somewhere that runs an i5 and with preferably 64 to 128gb ram in a small chassis? I want one for home and office.

Sorry if didn’t provide enough info. I’d rather buy something turn key and not have to worry about build and install software.

Thank you.

 

[garm]

You don’t need to run VMs to have an email server, you can set one up in a jail.

When you buy a server you size it after the workload you need, then you find a supplier that can deliver one 20% or more over the spec. Servers are sold directly by several companies, e.g Dell. eBay will have used gear that is still valuable as a home NAS running a few services. Unless you narrow down your question there isn’t much we can do but suggest random solutions. And for that there are already plenty of resources and discussion on the forum already you can look at

 

[ShaneFre]

You don’t need to run VMs to have an email server, you can set one up in a jail.

When you buy a server you size it after the workload you need, then you find a supplier that can deliver one 20% or more over the spec. Servers are sold directly by several companies, e.g Dell. eBay will have used gear that is still valuable as a home NAS running a few services. Unless you narrow down your question there isn’t much we can do but suggest random solutions. And for that there are already plenty of resources and discussion on the forum already you can look at

I don’t even know what a jail is. :-(

I just want a reliable, turn key solution I can ply with and the main thing we wanna try is host our own email, VM’s, and shared file sharing... I want to set up one st the small office we have, and one at home for off site back up... or we can back up to drop box as well.

 

[ShaneFre]

You don’t need to run VMs to have an email server, you can set one up in a jail.

When you buy a server you size it after the workload you need, then you find a supplier that can deliver one 20% or more over the spec. Servers are sold directly by several companies, e.g Dell. eBay will have used gear that is still valuable as a home NAS running a few services. Unless you narrow down your question there isn’t much we can do but suggest random solutions. And for that there are already plenty of resources and discussion on the forum already you can look at

Ok I just read up on Jails. I have a FreeNAS set up on an old server. I’ll go play with Jails. I can’t set up a mail server tho until I get a 2nd IP tho... already running exchange which am trying to get away from.

 

[garm]

When you have created a jail and you are in it, it effectively behaves as a vanilla FreeBSD instance. Find a guide you think sound plausible on setting up a mail server in FreeBSD and apply the requirements based on that guide to your hardware choices. Do the same for any other service you want to have. Then sum up the requirements and buy a HP or Dell server with the appropriate HDD slots for your storage needs. If it’s for business use I would highly suggest buying gear with warranty.

Geographic separation is good, but you should think through your disaster recovery from all angles. Just replicating one server to the other might not be adequate, if you delete a dataset it will also be deleted on the secondary system. Treat the second FreeNAS box as an extension to your pool (eg not backup) and make sure there is an immutable copy of important data as well.

 

[ShaneFre]

I thought snapshots would take care of that...

I have a lot to learn. I think too much. May just go with cloud hosting or does anyone wanna work remotely and earn some money to consult with me how to do this?

 

[garm]

Ya, snapshots are per dataset in a pool. If you remove the dataset the corresponding snapshots disappear as well.

Reading the literature is beyond highly recommended if you are to administer this. Alternatively you buy the solution from a credible supplier, iX sell solutions for example. There are probably others as well.

 

[blanchet]

FreeNAS is capable to run other operating systems with the following ways:

• FreeBSD in a jail (i.e a container), without overhead.
• many other operating systems (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD) within bhyve virtual machine

Nevertheless, FreeNAS is not a turn-key solution for virtualization:

• bhyve is more difficult to use than VirtualBox or VMware ESXi
• Windows guests have severe disk performance issue

Despite these limitations, the FreeNAS virtualization features are very interesting to setup all-in-one backup appliances
for example with BackupPC or Veeam Backup.

If you need a turnkey solution for file storage+virtualization in a small chassis, I think that a Nutanix Xpress appliance may interest you.
If you are interested only by email hosting, outsourcing to Google Gsuite may be easier and cheaper.

 

[Chris Moore]

Are you going to purchase new hardware or save money and buy quality used hardware?
The next question is, how much storage do you require, not just today, but for the next few years?
Answer that and it would give us some bassis for discussion on actual hardware.

 

[JoshDW19]

@ShaneFre before you send them back would you be willing to talk to one of our support engineers or myself about your needs? There's an option one of our web engineers mentioned called https://iredmail.org that's pretty easy to set up and would do the trick. Another option that's been mentioned is postfix. The Mini supports VMs but you may need additional memory depending on how many you may want to run at once.

 

[ShaneFre]

Ya, snapshots are per dataset in a pool. If you remove the dataset the corresponding snapshots disappear as well.

Reading the literature is beyond highly recommended if you are to administer this. Alternatively you buy the solution from a credible supplier, iX sell solutions for example. There are probably others as well.

What’s the purpose of a snapshot if the data is accidentally deleted, it can’t be recovered?

Man I have a lot of reading to do...

I tried to purchase from iX... I wanted something a little more powerful. Ultimately I have a time of i7 3rd and 4th gen PC’s laying around and I’d love to try and build a FreeNAS out of a couple of those, but the more I dig in, the more this doesn’t sound like a great idea. Hell even my Dropbox account keeps deleted items in it for 90 days and it’s in the cloud. Maybe I’ll just use that on a regular PC in our domain like I am now and forget about this FreeNAS idea. I just need an email solution.

 

[ShaneFre]

FreeNAS is capable to run other operating systems with the following ways:

• FreeBSD in a jail (i.e a container), without overhead.
• many other operating systems (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD) within bhyve virtual machine

Nevertheless, FreeNAS is not a turn-key solution for virtualization:

• bhyve is more difficult to use than VirtualBox or VMware ESXi
• Windows guests have severe disk performance issue

Despite these limitations, the FreeNAS virtualization features are very interesting to setup all-in-one backup appliances
for example with BackupPC or Veeam Backup.

If you need a turnkey solution for file storage+virtualization in a small chassis, I think that a Nutanix Xpress appliance may interest you.
If you are interested only by email hosting, outsourcing to Google Gsuite may be easier and cheaper.

I’m going to checkout These options this morning!

 

[blanchet]

When you use ZFS replication;

• If you delete a dataset, it would disappear on the target only if you use recursive replication
• If you use regular replication and then delete the dataset by mistake, you will receive an alert that the replication fails but the target dataset will stay untouched.

An alternative to ZFS replication is rsync replication with independant snapshot of both side, but it is slower and less practical.

 

[ShaneFre]

Are you going to purchase new hardware or save money and buy quality used hardware?
The next question is, how much storage do you require, not just today, but for the next few years?
Answer that and it would give us some bassis for discussion on actual hardware.

Well right now after 10 years of utilizing a server we have less than 1tb of data stored which includes all emailbixes. So the 16tb mini’s I ordered should have been PLENTY for us for future needs.

I had already looked into trying to use some old PC’s we have laying around on Windows 7, and have i7’s (3rd and 4th gen), and some healthy DDR3 ram like 64gb machines), but honestly I don’t know what’s the best damn, and boards to use for FreeNAS build, which is why I just bit the bullet and ordered the Mini’s... than my friend tells me the Atom processors in the Mini’s I ordered wont be powerful enough, so I sent them and the additional ram I purchased back.

To answer your question I’d rather just buy a turnkey solution than waste my time doing the research. I’d pay someone else for their time to do all the research and out the proper hardware together. I also had to read a lot of negative reviews on the Mini’s as far as mobo’s taking a dump after a year or so. I didnr want to deal with that at all either.

 

[ShaneFre]

@ShaneFre before you send them back would you be willing to talk to one of our support engineers or myself about your needs? There's an option one of our web engineers mentioned called https://iredmail.org that's pretty easy to set up and would do the trick. Another option that's been mentioned is postfix. The Mini supports VMs but you may need additional memory depending on how many you may want to run at once.

Yes Josh I would have loved to,
However I already sent them back. I should have called before sending them back, my fault.

My first concern was what I was reading in posts about the Mini’s board frying up after a year or so. 2nd I was told (by a friend) the Atom type processor in the mini wouldn’t be powerful enough.

With that said I’d love to talk to someone about a solution that’s save me time and put the money for the research in someone else’s pocket because I don’t have the time to research fully. I’ve been wanting to do this for a couple of years and just keep delaying it. Can you email me your direct number or someone willing to talk to me? My cell # is 209-six/four/nine-twenty-three-hundred.

 

[ShaneFre]

When you use ZFS replication;

• If you delete a dataset, it would disappear on the target only if you use recursive replication
• If you use regular replication and then delete the dataset by mistake, you will receive an alert that the replication fails but the target dataset will stay untouched.

An alternative to ZFS replication is rsync replication with independant snapshot of both side, but it is slower and less practical.

Perfect!

 

[JoshDW19]

No problem! While it's true there were issues with the Mini motherboard when they were released, iXsystems worked expeditiously with ASrock Rack to get those issues patched. Purchasing a Mini today does not have any of the past BMC / Chipset issues that would have caused a board to fail prematurely. For those customers that did experience an early failure, we extended the warranty of the motherboard to 3 years to ensure they could get a free replacement. We felt that was the right thing to do because we want to stand behind our products.

I will gladly get someone to talk to you directly. There are others here that are more well-versed than I am at server deployments so I'll hand your information off to one of our sales engineers to see if we can help you come up with an out of the box solution that you can just run with.

 

[ShaneFre]

Josh I did see that the problem was taken care of, which is why I decided to still try and communicate with iXsystems. I think the guys that have the experience is best to turn to for directive, and I appreciate the input gentleman. I do have FreeNAS on a server already at my office to play with, but ultimately I would like to get rid of that mini server rack we have and come up with something, if possible, with a small footprint that I can sit on my desk at the office, and one at my home (for replication / backups / home use as well). I am excited to talk with someone. Thanks again!

 

[JoshDW19]

I am excited to talk with someone. Thanks again!

No problem!

 

[blanchet]

Indeed you want a datacenter in a box to put on your desk.

https://b3n.org/supermicro-x10sdv-f-build-datacenter-in-a-box/
https://b3n.org/freenas-9-3-on-vmware-esxi-6-0-guide/

It is basically a FreeNAS mini chassis but with Xeon-D processor + VMware ESXi Free
maybe iXsystems can build it for you.