Ubuntu + ZFS?

[Chris230291]

Hi guys. First of all this might not be the best place to ask this question but I trust the community is professional and not biased.

For some time now my hardware hasnt been good enough to continue getting what I want out of it and FreeNAS. I cant run docker or VM's and as my requirements keep increasing it seems like FreeNAS is no longer for me. Even if I could use the latest features it seems everything is experimetal, hacky or just not possible (like GPU pass through to a VM).

Its time to look at my options and after learning that you can get ZFS on Ubuntu I am seriously considering just running that instead. I dont feel stuck to ZFS, but its been running problem free for years now. As I understand it I could just import my pool into Ubuntu too, win! I could also look into upgrading my system and running esxi with FreeNAS+Ubuntu.

Right now my server is 99% a media server and 1% a place where I dump things for safe keeping. I use Plex, Transmission, Sonarr etc and have a network share that anyone can access locally. I feel a lot of what FreeNAS offers is wasted on me.

I am curious if anyone can give me any advice here. What should I be aware of? What would I loose out on? Is ubuntu ZFS as reliable as FreeNAS?

Thanks,
Chris

 

[garm]

Been there, so when corral blew up I decided to migrate my server to vanilla FreeBSD. My home server is mostly storing pictures, home movies and documents. But, it’s also running several webservices and it’s not part of my general network. Tablets, phones and computers are on a dedicated VLAN and separate from jails or or their devices reachable from internet. All in all I would say that the entire IS infrastructure is about 40 hours worth of configuration, installation and testing. When I started I had a single computer behind a AirPort running FreeBSD and when that thing suffered a motherboard failure I also lost the boot device. It took be about a weekend to rebuild the system, import the pools and restoring all the jails (didn’t have warden or any other jail manager).

What made me start looking at FreeNAS was the configuration database. The old server booted of a 120 GB 3,5” spinner but with the new server I got greedy and wanted all the sata ports to handle pool disks, so it’s booting of a pair of USBs. They fail after about 18 months or uptime.. but replacing them is easy, even if both dies as I can just import my config (same with pfSense by the way). I have never had a more complex infrastructure as the one I have now, but it takes me less then an hour to rebuild it even if a fire took out all my hardware, I could simply not do that on FreeBSD, Ubuntu or any other server config.

I’m not sure why you say you can’t run Docker or VMs, or why that would change on Ubuntu. But you might want to rethink your view of FreeNAS. It’s a NAS, use it as one. If you have virtualization requirements or hardware requirements that it can accommodate, why not build a dedicated VM host and have FreeNAS do its thing, storing files?

 

[Chris230291]

Hi.

I cant run docker or VM's because my CPU doesnt have UG (I think thats the feature I'm missing). My understanding is thats a freenas/bhyve limitaion and not a docker limitation (docker requirements dont mention anything of the sort).

I'm not too concerned with config times if I had to reinstall. I can always do a initial or weekly backup if I wanted.

Running 2 systems isnt what I want. If I went with 2 systems FreeNAS offers nothing to me other than the pool and the shares. All the freenas plugins I would switch over to linux versions... I could even use docker containers on a seperate disk. Thats way a fresh install would just be importing the pool, setting up the share and installing docker.