I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.
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@scotth said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:
I'm running XenServer 7.2, Xen Orchestra Community (nice script, btw - I used Jarli01) and am fine with it so far. I played around tossing in a few distros and with a little more futzing around, I'm going to move my storage to a Linux distro, at least I'm leaning that way.
My default SR is local and I want to create reliable storage for a backup target. I have a decent box here, two 4T drives and have run Linux on it before.
Any faves, honorable mentions, quirks, hazards?
TIA
ScottPersonally I like md + LVM + XFS. XFS and btrfs are both completely valid avenues as well. Just stay away from the "NAS" distributions like FreeNAS. Better off managing it yourself the vast majority of the time.
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@travisdh1 I have some reading to do.
md + LVM + XFS. What's md?
XFS and btrfs. What's btrfs?
I should be able to fire up a VM (CentOS?) and experiment with this before I move to a physical box?
Any favorite distros?
EDIT: To clarify, this is for my home lab. I won't do this at work until I can break it and fix it. I haven't had a Linux box under my fingers for years, - many years.
I don't count appliances & preconfigured, vendor supplied VMs and boxes. Those I have in spades.
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FreeNAS, NAS4Free and so forth are "NAS OS" and should never be used. In a lab, you could consider them for testing things quickly, but never in production. It's a non-production category of products because of the Jurassic Park Effect (and just market realities.)
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@scotth said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:
XFS and btrfs. What's btrfs?
A newer ZFS-style filesystem native to Linux. Suse uses it by default. It is in the ZFS and ReFS filesystem family. Facebook uses it heavily. At this time, it's a "storage engineer only" tool, much like ReFS.
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You probably want to go with hardware RAID. You don't need any special features or performance of software RAID. Hardware RAID will help to keep things simple and easy to manage.
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CentOS, Fedora, openSuse Leap, openSuse Tumbleweed and Ubuntu current (17.04 right now) are the distro options that make sense for production servers and all work fine for a simple NFS server. CentOS is likely the easiest here and NFS never changes so the disadvantages of CentOS essentially don't apply here. So CentOS 7 is probably the way to go.
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LVM and XFS, for sure.
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@scottalanmiller I have a CentOS 7 VM ready to play with now. I also have Ubuntu 16.04 VM as well. I don't have a RAID card and am leary of using on board but I may try it anyway. I can always backup my shares to an external USB anyway.
Also, since it's playing around in my home lab, I can break quite a lot and get it back as long as my external backups are healthy.
I've been out of the 'hands on' Linux game for so long that I don't know what distro has the tools that will help me out. I've played around with it a bit in the last year. We'll see what comes.
Wish me luck.
Thanks for the advise.
Scott -
XFS==eXtensible File System, correct?
LVM== Logical Volume Manager?
If that's correct, I'm aware of those terms from the NAS's that I've played around with. -
@scotth said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:
XFS==eXtensible File System, correct?
XFS is the main filesystem for enterprise Linux. It is just XFS, don't know of it standing for anything. It is common on NAS devices.
ELFS is the eXtensible File System and is not used today by Linux or any NAS.
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@scotth said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:
LVM== Logical Volume Manager?
Yes, LVM is a thing like "RAID", not a specific one. All computers have an LVM. Windows has it, Linux has it, AIX has it, every NAS has it. The LVM in Linux is called LVM2.
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@scotth said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:
@scottalanmiller I have a CentOS 7 VM ready to play with now. I also have Ubuntu 16.04 VM as well.
Ubuntu 16.04 is three versions old. Those old LTS versions have limited support and only exists for application compatibility for apps that don't keep current. Never use an old OS version unless you have a specific compatibility issue that you can't avoid and are willing to accept (in many cases, this is a reason to avoid products that might have been abandoned.)
17.04 is current. I rarely use Ubuntu, but when I do, it's always current.
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@scotth said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:
I've been out of the 'hands on' Linux game for so long that I don't know what distro has the tools that will help me out.
No tools needed or beneficial for a straight NFS file server.
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@scottalanmiller said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:
@scotth said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:
I've been out of the 'hands on' Linux game for so long that I don't know what distro has the tools that will help me out.
No tools needed or beneficial for a straight NFS file server.
Lots of good info.
I'm going to go with CentOS 7 and pound on it.
Thanks. I really appreciate it.
EDIT: One more thing tangentially related -- Since I have XenServer running nicely, what's to stop me from firing up a VM for LDAP services, tying it to my new storage box and using my old storage box as a backup LDAP server?
I think it's nice practice. If I work it through to it's logical conclusion, I can marry up to AWS as well? At least for critical backups. -
@scottalanmiller honestly I would not go with btrfs regardless of facebook...
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@matteo-nunziati So, CentOS 7 , EXT4, LVM with compression turned on.
After all, I'm using consumer / smb desktop hardware. From what I've read, ZFS would require more resources than I have available if I wanted dedupe. My storage box will only have 8 GB RAM. -
@scotth said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:
@matteo-nunziati So, CentOS 7 , EXT4, LVM with compression turned on.
After all, I'm using consumer / smb desktop hardware. From what I've read, ZFS would require more resources than I have available if I wanted dedupe. My storage box will only have 8 GB RAM.Generally go XFS but even ext4 is good. ZFS requires something like 1gb per raw tb of storage but mostrly for raid/compression. It raises up to 5gb per tb if you want dedup.
So 8gb=8tb of raw (pre raid) storage.
ZFS is nice byt you usually can go w/out its features in smb -
@scotth compression?! What compression?!
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@scotth said in I tried NAS4Free, FreeNAS, OMV, ... Lots of suggestions to move to Linux. I'm willing. Point me please.:
@travisdh1 I have some reading to do.
md + LVM + XFS. What's md?
XFS and btrfs. What's btrfs?
I should be able to fire up a VM (CentOS?) and experiment with this before I move to a physical box?
Any favorite distros?
EDIT: To clarify, this is for my home lab. I won't do this at work until I can break it and fix it. I haven't had a Linux box under my fingers for years, - many years.
I don't count appliances & preconfigured, vendor supplied VMs and boxes. Those I have in spades.
ThanksJust because nobody else addressed this one point yet. md = multi disk, the Linux Kernel's built in software RAID. It's management tool is called mdadm, which is what most people, wrongly, refer to it as (I'm still trying to break myself of this habit.)
