Part I.
Ok, decided to start kind of a blog.
Long story short, I started using FreeNAS back at around version 0.7.x and fell in love with the USB drive-installable system, with ZFS. Had it running on an ATOM mobo with a fairly slow cpu. 3x1.5 Tb drives in a RaidZ1 setup. I stayed with the same OS through the Nas4Free years and even today when it is called XigmaNAS - same system, although the underlying hardware was switched first to a Dell PowerEdge T20 with the same 3 drives, + 1 without redundancy, then to the current PowerEdge T130.
Today's setup
is an ESXi host on the bare metal, XigmaNAS is on a root-on-zfs mirrored VM, an LSI 9211-8i card passes through a 2x2Tb ZFS mirror, and a 3 Tb not-so-important data drive to the XigmaNAS VM.
of course I backup the 2x2Tb mirror, since my raid only provides availability and not backup
The ESXi host has one single 500Gb SSD storage for holding the VMs. (so the aforementioned root-on-zfs mirror probably only makes sense for the XigmaNAS upgrades, where you have the chance to revert to the previous install should something go awry).
The host give home to occasional Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, FreeBSD and other VMs I use for work and home test lab.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- As much as I got familiar enough with FreeBSD, I feel that linux has a much larger user base and probably a more active development
- With Docker Support I found so many containers to my liking, it is vastly new, broader and wider world to me than what XigmaNAS offers today. (don't mean this as a negative comment really, after all, I used it for like 8 years )
Not really cons rather than my worries and learning curve milestones I guess:
- Doesn't seem that the Proxmox kernel was something bad, but I hope ZFS gets added to the 'regular' repo, I am a bit shy to tinker with the kernel, but hope someone here reassures me not to be. Or else, maybe I don't really need ZFS?
- Some of the Docker concepts are very new, and configuration can be a bit confusing here and there... lots to learn, but hey, I am lazy. This will get even more tricky with Portainer in OMV 5... I tried, but got lost...
- A bit worried about installing OMV on USB - again, plugin is there, but then where do I put the docker config files? Bit confused, hope that by X-Max I will become an OMV enthusiast
Requirements for the new system:
- ESXi on the metal can stay put. Works as expected and hosts a lot of other VMs already
- I want to have redundancy both for OpenMediaVault and the other VMs (basically use some kind of mirror for the ESXi storage I guess, but I have not done this before...)
- Passthrough mode for the LSI HBA dedicated to OMV - data disks will be handled by OMV
- Redundancy for all data that I have - be it SnapRaid, or stick to ZFS and another mirror, yet to decide
- Docker config - looking out for best practices where to put the /config files for the containers, etc
- Probably replacing PLEX with EMBY... I experience a lot of slow network response and long buffering times when continuing an episode or a movie... with EMBY it was pretty much instantaneous from my old test box, which is a ridiculous-in-comparison N40L HP Microserver, that is 8 years old now.
- Same goes with transmission - lacks some features, eg. delete after x days or hours of seeding, especially since on my test box with PLEX I now have a 2nd copy of everything, one is in the complete folder, one is in PLEX's media - although probably just a config issue.
- Docker containers, Docker containers, and even more Docker containers Well, only the ones that I got to like really.
- Heimdall
- Sonarr
- Radarr
- Jackett
- EMBY or Plex
- Transmission or another torrent client
- Pihole
- PXE and DHCP and SFTP for booting VMs from some images...
- Some home automation
- Anything that comes to my mind during or after the install. or you'd recommend to have
Sorry for the long post, but Techno Dad Life's videos MADE me do it!!