The Annual NAS Challenge For some reason I like to build large storage arrays. I do tend to eat up a lot of storage and over time I’ve filled them up. Mediachance Editstudio 6 0 5 Rarely Seen Historical Photos there. For the last couple of years I’ve gone big and in 2016 I decided to just buy an off the shelf Drobo 5N filled with 5x 4TB SATA drives. It’s fine but there have been a few issues with it – the lack of active directory integration means I cannot securely use it to store virtual machine disk images for Hyper V Server and a lack of iSCSI and slightly lack-lustre out the box NFS implementation has left me with the same problem for VMWare ESXi virtual machines. I’ve ended up just using it to store all my old backups and ISOs but don’t feel I’m getting the most out of it. I had some old parts sat around that – motherboards, CPUs, RAM and a lot of disks. Amongst them were 4x 4TB matched SAS drives and a SAS HBA I had used on.

At that time I was working on a NAS that I never quite felt happy with and then personal issues meant I had to leave it in an undesired state. Most of it got torn down but a few bits remained so this year is mostly a rebuild of a NAS from the past but with a clear intention on stability and performance – at least matching my Drobo 5N when it comes to network speed. The last NAS had a number of issues: • Trying to get everything in to a 2U case proved extremely loud and messy • Consumer grade hardware posed issues with OpenIndiana, switched to FreeBSD • iSCSI stability issues – regularly lag spikes • Speed never ended up particularly high • Significant management overhead just to keep it running I did however really enjoy working with ZFS and found iSCSI worked wonderfully for my virtualization needs. Update – 2017-06-25 At the request of a comment I’ve added a few more details. I’ve put some of the VM files up on pastebin – including the VMX file () which is the easiest way to see all configuration settings.

The disk configuration used for the VM itself (not data disks) is two SSDs that attach to the host’s SATA controller. One of these has ESXi installed with the remaining space allocated as an ESXi datastore. The other of these is just setup as an ESXi datastore. The VM was created on the first datastore and has a second disk on the second data store (so ESXi sees two disks to the VM – one per datastore). During FreeNAS configuration these are set up as a ZFS mirror for redundancy.

Other Build a ZFS NAS. To get a GUI for package install, system monitoring, well. It might be possible to turn a FreeNAS system into full FreeBSD. Jan 02, 2017 Virtualised 2017 Home NAS Build – FreeNAS 9. The build is detailed in full in the video at the top of this. During the install of ESXI 6.5 I had a.

Other than that they are plain old VMDKs – just containing FreeNAS. No aspect of mirroring / redundancy is applied at host/ESXi level other than physical disk separation. You can view them here /. The physical NICs are made up of 4xne10000 drivers and 1xr8168 driver. The R8168 is just for management and the ne1000 is for iSCSI. The only driver I had to add in is the R8168 and details for this are in the main post. Several people also questioned about link aggregation on YouTube.

I never got around to this as my use-cases have never really saturated this link. I know a few people wanted more than 1GBps to a single host (rather than more than 1GBps available to multiple hosts) – this doesn’t work as you’d expect with link aggregation and I’d strongly recommend a cheap 4GBps Fibre SAN with some HBAs/old Brocade switch from eBay instead – this won’t cost you much more than £40 for a couple of machines.

Before you begin, you need to ensure that you have everything you need. This includes the following: • A device that meets minimum requirements (see the link above). • 8GB USB drive (for OS).

• 1GB USB drive or DVD (for OS install). • FreeNAS.iso file. In order to install FreeNAS on a free PC, you need to make sure the USB drive is bootable and has all the necessary files. Because disks are fading out in favor of removable media, here's how you can get a USB drive ready to go: •. • Insert your USB drive.

• Download (a program to create bootable USB drives). • Run Rufus, and select the USB. • Click the disk image next to Create a bootable disk using. • Navigate to the downloaded FreeNAS.iso file. • Select the.iso file. • Click Start. The USB drive is now ready to be inserted into the FreeNAS PC to install the OS.

Installing FreeNAS OS. When firing up your FreeNAS PC, you should see a boot screen that displays FreeNAS as an option.

You'll want to select this to continue. If nothing appears, you may need to hit the boot menu shortcut for your motherboard (ours is F11) during startup or make sure the USB drive has been successfully set up. Then do the following: • Select Install/Upgrade.