Freenas – a free nas/san option for your VMware environment


As part of a project – a client has requested a NAS solution for duplicating backups stored elsewhere. As we were moving the client to a SAN based VMware infrastructure – this meant that we had a few ESXI machines with local storage that could be used for this purpose. So enter Freenas as an option for this problem

FreeNAS is an embedded open source NAS (Network-Attached Storage) distribution based on FreeBSD, supporting the following protocols: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI (initiator and target) and UPnP.

It supports Software RAID (0,1,5), ZFS, disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T/email monitoring with a WEB configuration interface (from m0n0wall).

FreeNAS can be installed on Compact Flash/USB key, hard drive or booted from LiveCD.

You can pick it up from here

I have to say it does look a whole lot more polished and function since my last encounter and the addition of iscsi support opens up some other possibilities to trial. More as that unfolds.