FreeNAS Alternatives - LUbuntu or Proxmox?

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

I am building a small 8-9 disk NAS for home media that I plan to use RAIDZ-2 or RAIDZ-3 via ZFS and am undecided on the software configuration.

FreeNAS is the obvious choice but both FreeNAS 9 and FreeNAS 11 hang when installing due to the older hardware in use (repurposed old PC). Looking around, Fedora, Lubuntu, and Proxmox are prime candidates that also support ZFS and containerization technologies.

I prefer Linux over BSD and am more familiar with Debian than Fedora systems hence eyeing up Lubuntu. Proxmox also caught my eye but I know nothig about setting it up correctly for my hardware and do not know if it will support my PCI/PCI-E Add-in cards for additional SATA ports. I happen to know Lubuntu does support them.

These are my requirements:

  • CIFS/SMB share @ 5+ MBps
  • ZFS in RAIDZ-2 or RAIDZ-3
  • No additional software/hardware purchases
  • VM/Sandbox/Jail for untrusted connections get routed into ()

Are there any software solutions besides Lubuntu 16 LTS and Proxmox 5 that I should consider?

System Specs:

  • Athlon X2 4850e @ 2.5 Ghz
  • ASUS M3A78-EM (4x Onboard SATA ports still work)
  • 8 GB Non-ECC DDR2 @ 720 Mhz
  • 8-9 2TB SATA HDDs
  • Rosewill Stealth (pics available upon request)
  • VANTEC 6-Port SATA II 150 PCI Host Card Model UGT-ST310R
  • IO Crest PCIex1 Interface Version 1.0 4-Port Internal SATA 6Gbps Controller Card

Additional hardware available:

  • 1 x 80 GB IDE HDD
  • 1 x 16 GB USB Flash Drive
  • 1 x 32 GB USB Flash drive
  • 1 x 128 GB SATA SSD
  • Optical drive (maybe)
1 Like
2

Promox is ideal and very easy for the VM/Sandbox/Jail functionality but from what I recall has no fuctions for sharing. I use openmediavault for NAS functionality (it supports zfs) daily but the VM/docker plugins are not in a very good state, although you can run docker/container/etc.. on command line via ssh.

I don't know how complex you system is going to be, setting up samba for file sharing by command line is far more easier than setting up vm/containers so I would should promox since it provides a webgui to setup easily VM/containers.

3

I will try to get things to work with Proxmox then and report back on how it goes.

4

Openmediavault makes more sense overall but actually, I would like to someday expose the ruTorrent frontend. A platform that manages VMs by design is more appropriate for my use case.

What I did not understand is that Proxmox is Debian. Samba can even work on Proxmox directly, although that misses the point of the distribution.

It was actually simpler to get to work than I expected, although it took a long time to read up on and get everything documented correctly.

Documentation/How To Guide Link: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/how-to-create-nas-using-zfs-and-proxmox-with-pictures/117375

For Samba and related file sharing protocols, there is also this project called Turnkey Linux that automates the bulk of the work and just needs tweaking here and there to work correctly with people's configs.

5

There are many alternatives to Freenas available in the market apart from LUbuntu and Proxmox

  1. OpenMediaVault:
  2. NAS4Free
  3. Weezo
  4. ZFSguru