Hello to all :)

[kwelch007]

We (well, technically my employer, so, the "Royal We" :) just purchased a NAS device from iXSystems, it arrived yesterday, and appears to be working wonderfully! Was literally plug-and-play, which was exactly what I wanted. We purchased the device to be used as a target for Veeam Backups and Shadow Copies from Windows VM's, for which it seems very well suited IMHO.

That said, I'm totally new to FreeNAS, so I'm bound to have some configuration questions that I hope you won't be opposed to assisting me with if you can. As I grow in knowledge, I hope I can re-contribute to the community by helping other new users.

 

[BigDave]

Welcome to the forums @kwelch007
First suggestion is to burn in the components before anything else. If your employer is wanting to place the new hardware into immediate production, your job is to warn them of the risk of doing so.
While the burn in process is ongoing you can take that time to read the FreeNAS documentation, cover to cover at least twice! Make sure the SMART testing recommendations are followed and the alert email is set up to the person that will admin the NAS. If possible, avoid using encryption on the pool UNLESS the admin is thoroughly versed in failed drive recovery with an encrypted pool before using this feature in production.
Please also note that in a business environment, FreeNAS is anything but plug-and-play IMHO :)

 

[joeschmuck]

Welcome to the FreeNAS Forums.

Please read our forum rules and when posting a question, please try to include any possible details you can think of. If you forget something, don't worry, we will tell you about it.

As @BigDave said, read that user manual cover to cover twice. Also, you wouldn't place the FreeNAS server into production use just yet, now if the time to burn in the system and then play and learn about configuring the system and recovery from failure. It appears that you are using the device as a simple backup medium so that makes life a bit simpler, well until you start assigning users and privileges, YIKES!

If you cannot play with this system then I highly recommend that you create a VM of FreeNAS on some other system and play with that one. And ensure you know how to replace a failing hard drive. As @BigDave said, stay clear of encryption if you can but if you can't, you better know all the steps it takes to replace a failed hard drive and bring the system back up. Something I did a few years ago was to create a step by step procedure on how to replace a failed hard drive. It's not a difficult thing to do but you never want to be looking up all the steps during a time of crisis. Of course if there is not encryption then replacement is fairly simple, but still you might want to make some steps on a piece of paper and tape it to the server for when the time comes. I can't tell you how many times we have seen postings of some poor schlep who inherited a FreeNAS system as it broke and was panicking for help to replace a hard drive or recover the data.

Good luck!

 

[kwelch007]

Welcome to the forums @kwelch007
First suggestion is to burn in the components before anything else. If your employer is wanting to place the new hardware into immediate production, your job is to warn them of the risk of doing so.
While the burn in process is ongoing you can take that time to read the FreeNAS documentation, cover to cover at least twice! Make sure the SMART testing recommendations are followed and the alert email is set up to the person that will admin the NAS. If possible, avoid using encryption on the pool UNLESS the admin is thoroughly versed in failed drive recovery with an encrypted pool before using this feature in production.
Please also note that in a business environment, FreeNAS is anything but plug-and-play IMHO :)

BigDave, I definitely appreciate your input and agree. I have a solution in place and will continue using it until I'm firmly confident in this new solution, which will likely take some weeks. I appreciate all of your welcome comments!