Merlin Hartley
Cadet
- Joined
- Mar 7, 2014
- Messages
- 1
Greetings folks, I've been looking at FreeNAS for a few years now and played around with an installation or two - though never created a live product. I actually came across the product while looking for a free ZFS solution...
I am just about to replace our ageing Windows 2003 file server and I have come to the realisation that FreeNAS has the feature-set that I need (e.g. SMB, NFS, TimeMachine, AD integration)
Let me give a quick breakdown of our setup: we have a HP Blade system attached to Brocade SAN with HP P-2000 storage arrays. This provides an amazing amount of stability and flexibility for us and we run around 20 servers (on 8 physical blades) - all running natively on CentOS with Windows & CentOS Virtual Machines using KVM. We use LVM for disk management (on the host machines) and offer these as raw disks using VirtIO to the guest VMs - we rely on the P-2000 RAID6 for resilience (multipathd with 4 paths).
I was about to embark on installing FreeNAS into a VM on CentOS (KVM) with raw disks offered through the LVM of the host OS (via the SAN)....
...
Then I read horror stories on this forum of trying to use FreeNAS in a VM (with KVM especially mentioned as "you are on your own").
...
But it seems I may be OK as long as I use UFS instead of ZFS.
Am I really the only person that wants to run FreeNAS in such a way?
Will I lose any of the networked functionality (e.g. permissions/xattrs) if I use UFS instead of ZFS?
Should I really be looking for a different product? (perhaps Windows 2012R2?)
Many thanks for your time!
I am just about to replace our ageing Windows 2003 file server and I have come to the realisation that FreeNAS has the feature-set that I need (e.g. SMB, NFS, TimeMachine, AD integration)
Let me give a quick breakdown of our setup: we have a HP Blade system attached to Brocade SAN with HP P-2000 storage arrays. This provides an amazing amount of stability and flexibility for us and we run around 20 servers (on 8 physical blades) - all running natively on CentOS with Windows & CentOS Virtual Machines using KVM. We use LVM for disk management (on the host machines) and offer these as raw disks using VirtIO to the guest VMs - we rely on the P-2000 RAID6 for resilience (multipathd with 4 paths).
I was about to embark on installing FreeNAS into a VM on CentOS (KVM) with raw disks offered through the LVM of the host OS (via the SAN)....
...
Then I read horror stories on this forum of trying to use FreeNAS in a VM (with KVM especially mentioned as "you are on your own").
...
But it seems I may be OK as long as I use UFS instead of ZFS.
Am I really the only person that wants to run FreeNAS in such a way?
Will I lose any of the networked functionality (e.g. permissions/xattrs) if I use UFS instead of ZFS?
Should I really be looking for a different product? (perhaps Windows 2012R2?)
Many thanks for your time!