NAS operating system and ESXi?

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luckylinux

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 19, 2012
Messages
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A while ago I setup my home NAS using FreeBSD, but for some reason it doesn't work as I'd love to.

For instance I couldn't get sleep support to work and haven't got too much time to debug that. Samba AD DC wouldn't work either.


At the time I set this up, ESXi Free version was still limited to 32GB of RAM.
With this limit out of the way I'm seriously considering moving all my data to an All-in-one solution with NAS as well as other services.

The reason for this is that my NAS is actually (quite :rolleyes:) overkill for just a NAS: dual socket 2011 with currently installed 1xE5-2620 and 64GB of ECC Registered RAM.
FreeBSD kinda solves this problem using virtualization. I may use jails, although since I'm not familiar with them, I'm using Virtualbox + PHPVirtualbox which work very well.


I'm not sure if it would be better to:
a) Stay with FreeBSD + Virtualbox
b) Going ESXi with the NAS on OmniOS / FreeNAS / FreeBSD:)confused) using Remote Devices Mapping and other VMs managed directly by ESXi

At the moment I have FreeBSD Root on 2x(Mirror, 2TB each) and Data on 6x(RAIDZ2, 3TB each). While the performance penality brought by using 8x(RAIDZ2, 3TB each or even upgrading all drives to 4TB) may be neglible, I'm a bit concerned by where to put the ESXi boot image and the NAS's root installation.
ESXi may stay on one USB/SD? But that wouldn't provide any redundancy at all.
As for the NAS boot disk, it may be passed through ESXi using 2 of the onboard Sata ports of the C602 chipset (or maybe not :() and using two 64GB SSDs I already have as boot disk.

Any suggestions are welcome. Currently I also have another NAS box to setup (HP Microserver N54L, very cheap right now) so I'd like to know if OmniOS / FreeNAS / FreeBSD was "better".
Right now the comand line interface on FreeBSD doesn't scare me "that" much. I managed to mount/unmount my encrypted GELI drives using some simple BASH scripts.

Would OmniOS be a better / safer solution for a NAS in order to keep my data safe? Or FreeBSD may still do the best job?
However using ESXi I suppose that FreeBSD would have no further purpose as the NAS operating system.

Any suggestion is welcome. Thank you very much in advance.

Further details:
1) I currently have ABSOLUTELY no experience with Solaris-based operating systems/distributions. I know that there is Napp-it but I'm not sure what I'll be able to do if something goes terribly wrong and there is no fix via the GUI.

2) Considering setting up OwnCloud. Not sure if this is any relevant though (possibly more complicated on OmniOS :confused:)
 
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luckylinux said:
Further details:
1) I currently have ABSOLUTELY no experience with Solaris-based operating systems/distributions. I know that there is Napp-it but I'm not sure what I'll be able to do if something goes terribly wrong and there is no fix via the GUI.
Click to expand...

BSD; Linux and Solaris are quite similar in many aspects. Illumos based systems can use IPS or pkgin to install applications http://pkgsrc-us-east.joyent.com/changes.html#major-changes-in-pkgsrc2013q4. They differ mostly in servicemanagement, network management and included projects like the Comstar, Crossbow or Solaris CIFS server. (I mostly use Solaris because of them)

You find a perfect documentation for OmniOS/OI management from Oracle for Solaris Express 11 (mostly identical to OmniOS). Google helps to find them as Oracle links only the the current but quite different Solaris 11.1. For usual settings you can use my napp-it.

see http://archive.is/snZaS

2) Considering setting up OwnCloud. Not sure if this is any relevant though (possibly more complicated on OmniOS :confused:)
Click to expand...

There is a free online setup script that installs AMP + Owncloud on OmniOS
Today I uploaded a new version with Owncloud 6
(created by Effemmess/zos as a community project)

see http://www.napp-it.org/extensions/ampo_en.html
 
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_Gea said:
BSD; Linux and Solaris are quite similar. They differ mostly in servicemanagement, network management and included projects like the Comstar, Crossbow or Solaris CIFS server. (I mostly use Solaris because of them)
Click to expand...
True. I must admit that getting networking to work on FreeBSD with my Linux background took quite a long time (> 1 week).

Since this is a NAS at home I don't really need ISCSI. As far as I can see I won't need in the future. I suppose they might be useful when used for VM storage for instance, but you still can do that over SMB/NFS (with some performance penality which isn't much of a concern for me at home anyway).

Therefore you would reccomend the ESXi + OmniOS configuration where OmniOS would act both as NAS as the VM storage for other VMs?
 
The idea of napp-it is good. The interface seems more stable and reliable than that of FreeNAS (which is why I hadn't used FreeNAS - yet at least).

What concerns me is how such a solution would cost if I had to install all the extensions (encryption and replication at least) for home noncommercial use ...
Furthermore it is not so much clear how encryption would work on Illumos-based systems.
You seem to state on the napp-it website that you have a pool inside a pool :confused:
 
Napp-it is free in all features that you need at home. Some features like highspeed network-replication between servers are not free but you can use cli commands or other free scripts (They finance a free napp-it) or you can buy a homeuse license for these extensions.

You can use my replication script for free for local manual replications. Encryption without my menus can be done with some cli commands, see http://napp-it.org/extensions/encryption.html

Encryption is a problem as the only ZFS integrated encryption is in Oracle Solaris 11 (closed source). You can use encrypted devices below your ZFS pool instead with Geli (BSD), Lofiadm (OmniOS) or Luks (Linux) - each with special advantages and disadvantages. Lofiadm for example is the slowest among them but the only that allows to backup encrypted pools with ZFS security to unsave or unreliable locations like disks, USB sticks or the cloud.

Biggest problem: they are all incompatible between the platforms. I really hope for a common solution with OpenZFS.org.
 
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_Gea said:
Biggest problem: they are all incompatible between the platforms. I really hope for a common solution with OpenZFS.org.
Click to expand...

That's not really a problem in my opinion. It's just a bit sub-optimal.
If I need to transfer the pool from A to B I just need unlock the drives, mount the pool on A and then do a ZFS send over SSH to B, wouldn't I?

I saw http://www.napp-it.org/extensions/index.html and I think the prices you claim for home users are fair.

I also took a look at the license of napp-it and it seems like anyone could develop their own extensions. Are there any tutorials/instructions/examples available on how to do that? What programming language are the plugins written in (PHP/Perl/Python)?

Thank you very much.
 
luckylinux said:
I also took a look at the license of napp-it and it seems like anyone could develop their own extensions. Are there any tutorials/instructions/examples available on how to do that? What programming language are the plugins written in (PHP/Perl/Python)?

Thank you very much.
Click to expand...

napp-it is pure Perl with readable and documented sources. If you are running napp-it, see scripts in /var/web-gui/data/ (each menu is a folder with an action.pl within), the menu "My menus" with examples or http://www.napp-it.org/doc/downloads/advanced_user.pdf

To create a new menu item, just create a new folder where the menu should be, add an action.pl with a print "hello world"; and here you are.
You may also look at the free add-ons like Mediatomb and how they are done.
 
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I just recently started using an all in 1 server, I even put my pfSense router in it. I was worried about that at first but I'm loving it! I just use Solaris 11.1 for my storage server. It didn't take much work to figure out basic sharing and such. I tried napp-it but I wasn't much of a fan.

As long as your CPU supports VT-d so you can use direct path IO and give your storage server VM direct access to an HBA, I would say try it. It works amazing.
 
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