I've been building a home server to use as NAS and for a couple small workloads that run inside VMs. I've been trying virtually any NAS operating system, from FreeNAS to Windows Server, passing through a bunch of other options, eventually landing on OMV.
OMV looked great. It has basically every single feature I was looking for (with the exception of an easy way to integrate with ActiveDirectory/LDAP...), and I like how it's basically just an add-on to a plain Linux install, without taking possession of too many things on the underlying system.
However, I believe OMV has a terrible flaw: it's based on Debian. I have nothing wrong with Debian per se, and I can understand why a lot of people love it (it's one of the most "open" Linux distros around). However, maybe because I work in IT and thus I deal with enterprise IT people daily, I couldn't think using a Debian-based system in production, for the same reason why enterprise sysadmins don't: it doesn't have a proper support.
We all know Debian is community-driven, which is one of the biggest strength of the distro, but also its biggest problem. For example, now that Debian 8 has been released, Debian 7 is already "out of production", with support (and patches!) offered only by volunteers without any guarantee. Compare that with Ubuntu, where LTS releases get updates for 5 years, or RHEL/CentOS that gets maintained for 10 years!
I understand that the goal of OMV is to be agile and have frequent releases. However, once I'm done setting up my NAS, I don't want to be doing weekly maintenance to update the entire OS - or risk having an unmaintained platform. For example, if I were to install OMV 2 now, in a few weeks I'd have to update it to OMV 3, which is based on Debian 8: this means updating the NAS software AND the underlying OS too, and I must make sure that everything runs smoothly. If I don't update, not only I won't be getting new releases of OMV, but I will also be stuck on Debian 7 (which won't be supported for much longer).
So, my request: can you consider switching to a distro like Ubuntu LTS or CentOS, that offer support/updates for at least 5 years?