(Virtualized) Nas OS suggestions

[wooki3]

Hello All, long time lurker and viewer

anyways to get straight to the point, Currently running proxmox on my r710, I'm a big fan of prox and would like to stay with it. Ive been running Freenas in a VM for over a year, and before you freak out, I passed through the PCI HBA controller so there is direct drive access. The nas is using 5x 3TB reds and I have one that is down which is why Im now here. I have all the data currently backed up on another drive and was wanting to move to a NAS os that is more flexible, Like Unraid, so I can gradually replace the 3TB drives with 6TB drives. I havent been able to find a very up to date guide for creating a Unraid VM so if someone has on Ill jump ship straight to unraid.

 

Other than Unraid what are some other OS's you've tried? I want something that does raid 5/equivalent and that is stable. Ive been playing around with Rockstor and its alright but still has a few kinks to work out before id want to move to it.

 

Thanks

[Crunchy Dragon]

I've heard FreeNAS is good, not sure how well it runs as a VM, though.

[dalekphalm]

44 minutes ago, wooki3 said:

Hello All, long time lurker and viewer

anyways to get straight to the point, Currently running proxmox on my r710, I'm a big fan of prox and would like to stay with it. Ive been running Freenas in a VM for over a year, and before you freak out, I passed through the PCI HBA controller so there is direct drive access. The nas is using 5x 3TB reds and I have one that is down which is why Im now here. I have all the data currently backed up on another drive and was wanting to move to a NAS os that is more flexible, Like Unraid, so I can gradually replace the 3TB drives with 6TB drives. I havent been able to find a very up to date guide for creating a Unraid VM so if someone has on Ill jump ship straight to unraid.

I'd recommend FreeNAS or Windows Server for a NAS VM. In FreeNAS, you'll want to make sure you're using PCIe Passthrough on your storage controller (either an HBA, or SATA expansion cards) so that FreeNAS has direct low level access to the HDD's.

 

For Windows, if you intend on using Storage Spaces, it's ideal that you do the same thing (PCIe Passthrough), but it's less strictly important.

44 minutes ago, wooki3 said:

Other than Unraid what are some other OS's you've tried? I want something that does raid 5/equivalent and that is stable. Ive been playing around with Rockstor and its alright but still has a few kinks to work out before id want to move to it.

 

Thanks

I personally wouldn't use unRAID as a VM - especially if you want to use it just as a NAS. The primary benefit of unRAID is that it has built-in NAS functions, but also easy to use VM functions. If you're not using the VM portion of unRAID, there are simply better NAS options.

 

Personally, I use ESXi + FreeNAS as a VM. It works very well. Proxmox would allow you to do the exact same setup as mine.

32 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I've heard FreeNAS is good, not sure how well it runs as a VM, though.

FreeNAS runs well virtualized, so long as you use hardware virtualization to "pass" your storage controller (usually an HBA - but SATA expansion cards also work) to the VM. FreeNAS loses the benefits of ZFS if it is dealt virtual HDD's or HDD's from a RAID Card.

[wooki3]

43 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I've heard FreeNAS is good, not sure how well it runs as a VM, though.

 

6 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

I'd recommend FreeNAS or Windows Server for a NAS VM.

Thanks for the suggestions. Im already running Freenas currently in a VM(with HBA passthrough etc), The whole point in wanting to switch is just for having better drive flexibility and want to be able to mix drives/upgrade them gradually, which as far as I'm aware Im unable to do in freenas. I want something stable however most of the content on the nas will be *replaceable* media, Anything important is backed up nightly offsite. So if running a VM of Unraid or w/e other operating system losses some stability its not crazy bad.

[dalekphalm]

2 hours ago, wooki3 said:

 

Thanks for the suggestions. Im already running Freenas currently in a VM(with HBA passthrough etc), The whole point in wanting to switch is just for having better drive flexibility and want to be able to mix drives/upgrade them gradually, which as far as I'm aware Im unable to do in freenas. I want something stable however most of the content on the nas will be *replaceable* media, Anything important is backed up nightly offsite. So if running a VM of Unraid or w/e other operating system losses some stability its not crazy bad.

If drive flexibility during expansion is your priority, there are multiple options:

 

1. unRAID does allow easy expansion

2. Windows + FlexRAID - very similar to the unRAID system

3. XPenology - the x86 port of the Synology OS - use Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) - get all the other benefits of the Synology OS

 

these are just three of many options.

 

You can still use FreeNAS, but storage expansion requires more thought and planning. You can easily expand an array by spanning it with another identical array. But that's a costly upgrade (double your storage) - assuming you even have enough free HDD bays.

 

Official RAIDZ1 pool expansion is "coming". When? Not sure - but it's in active development.

[Crunchy Dragon]

4 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

FreeNAS runs well virtualized, so long as you use hardware virtualization to "pass" your storage controller (usually an HBA - but SATA expansion cards also work) to the VM. FreeNAS loses the benefits of ZFS if it is dealt virtual HDD's or HDD's from a RAID Card.

Thanks for the clarification

[Mikensan]

you can replace drives in a vdev with larger disks slowly as you mentioned, however you won't see the extra storage available until it's all ugpraded.

 

If you're running proxmox already, no need for unraid. The main thing people use unraid for is the VMs, which it uses KVM for anywho. If you liked FreeNAS but want flexibility just use NAS4Free + UFS. Or from the proxmox box itself, use MDADM to set them up and install whatever VM you want ontop to share out files.

[wooki3]

Well 4 6TB drives are on the way. Im going to poke around with Nas4free before they get here but at very least will hopefully be enough storage to hold me until they roll out the ZFS update to allow single disk expansion if I end up sticking with freenas, Thanks for the suggestions guys