Virtual FreeNAS on a Mac

[rogerh]

I want an instance of FreeNAS to occasionally tinker with, for instance to see why things are broken. It seems unwise to do this on my main NAS and other machines I have are not powerful enough and have insufficient memory to run a FreeNAS virtual machine. I am typing this on a Macbook Pro which has 16GB of memory and spare processing power, and I wondered if there was any way to virtualise FreeNAS in OSX? I don't want it to handle real data, just to experiment with. Many thanks for any advice.

 

[Chris Moore]

I am pretty sure that this is still a valid option, for testing. Install VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Create a VM and install FreeNAS inside it.
Here is a thread where it is discussed: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-virtualbox.46693/
I am quite sure it is discussed elsewhere.
Many people have done this, including me, but I did it on my Windows (Dell) laptop. It should be fine.

 

[danb35]

Yes, FreeNAS runs just fine for testing purposes under VirtualBox on a Mac--I've done it many times. Certainly wouldn't want to run it in production that way, but as a test instance it works well.

 

[rogerh]

Thanks, both of you. I'll try it when I have time.

 

[seanm]

I successfully run (a test instance of) FreeNAS on VMWare Fusion hosted on macOS.

 

[rogerh]

Anyone tried Parellels to run FreeNAS?