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FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault

A

Azhar

Fixing stupid since 1972
Joined
Jan 9, 2001
Messages
18,877
Been reading the introduction Wiki for FreeNAS and saw that they branched out into two after version 7: FreeNAS 8 and OpenMediaVault.

I've been looking at some of the videos provided by OpenMediaVault and it looks stupid simple to use. Any reason why I should use FreeNAS or why I should use OpenMediaVault?
 
Take your pick - there are several other options too.
FreeNAS has ZFS though.

Most popular around here seems to be OpenIndiana with the Napp-it web UI.
 
I'm not much of a Linux/Solaris guru enough to want to experiment with a complete distro on a populated 12TB set.

I've been reading that FreeNAS is best because of ZFS, but ZFS is very RAM intensive. Their recommendation is 6GB minimum, 8GB recommended. My new storage server is an AMD A4 Llano on an ASRock A75 Extreme6 and 4GB DDR3-1600.

This is making me lean toward OpenMediaVault.

On the other hand they say software RAID 5 can be slow in either OpenMediaVault and FreeNAS.

Decisions decisions..
 
Since OpenMediaVault is debian based and doesn't support ZFS (at least by default), I would go FreeNAS. I currently have a 26tb zpool on an Atom server with 4gb ram and performance is still fine for a media server. Not gonna win any speed awards, but I can average at least 40MB/s writes to it across the network.
 
ZFS doesn't need a huge amount of memory to serve large media files over a home network to just a few users.

ZFS can be RAM intensive, depending on how you use it, but there is a world of difference between serving up movies to a few client PCs at home, and, for example, supporting thousands of users with small random database queries in a live commercial environment.


As for being a "guru" - the idea behind napp-it is that you don't really need to be - you drive the config etc from the browser - similar to FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault really.
There's a little more setup to be fair, but you don't need to be an expert - just follow the guide and it's pretty easy actually!

Take all 3 for a spin and see what you think!
One advantage of ZFS is that you can change OS fairly easily, as long as the OS you change to supports ZFS (and the pool version you currently have) - it's really little more than just export pools, install new OS, import pools - that easy! ;)
 
Also, it's commonly misunderstood that you NEED the tons of RAM. If you have it, it will be used for ARC, but you don't *need* it per-se. Also, I tried to DL and install an OMV in an ESXi VM and it consistently hangs during install at the 'Disabling netinst cd from install sources at 33%' (paraphrasing since I didn't get a screen capture). I only found one person who complained about this in German, and the dev said 'beats me, this is the standard debian installer'! I'm guessing I guessed the wrong debian guest OS info during VM creation, but I honestly don't care enough to find out...
 
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A lot of people love zfs and seem to recommend it to everyone who comes asking about storage systems. Personally, I feel that it's over-recommended. While zfs is a great solution for some users, it isn't a storage panacea. None of the currently available free solutions are perfect.

ZFS has two big shortfalls right now. First, adding additional storage is not as easy as adding another disk and doing a raid reshape. Disks must be added in groups. Second, zfs lacks encryption. If you care about these things you would be better off with something other than zfs.

That said, ZFS has some unique features that are highly valued by some users. Everyone else will be happy to point those out for you. ;)

As for slowdowns on software raid, current processors are more than fast enough. On Linux, RAID 5/6 calculations are done using SSE3 instructions. (I think it's SSE3. Might be SSE2.) You will not see a slowdown from software raid on a modern processor.
 
kristof said:
ZFS has two big shortfalls right now. First, adding additional storage is not as easy as adding another disk and doing a raid reshape. Disks must be added in groups. Second, zfs lacks encryption. If you care about these things you would be better off with something other than zfs.
Click to expand...

Adding at least pairs of disks to keep Raid redundancy seems a small problem compared to the ZFS advantages like copy on write (reason of painless/thousands snaps), checksums (reason of "I am sure, data is valid"), self healing/ online scrubbing/repairing silent data errors (needs both). The improvements of ZFS (some of them are found in the newest Filesystems btrfs and Win ReFS too - years later) are current state of the art regarding file-systems.

If you need encryption, you may use Solaris 11 (encryption within ZFS) or pools build from encrypted devices below..(FreeBSD/OI/Linux/any Solaris).

I have added encryption even in napp-it to become easy to use on any (Solaris based) ZFS version.
- and would prefer the idea of ZFS pools on encrypted devices over ZFS encryption found in Solaris 11 because you can backup the first to any storage (even unencrypted cloud) without loosing ZFS data security or encryption with the price of 10-20% lower performance.
 
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I knew I would feel the wrath of the HardZFS gang for my post! :)

_Gea said:
Adding at least pairs of disks to keep Raid redundancy seems a small problem compared to the ZFS advantages like copy on write (reason of painless/thousands snaps), checksums (reason of "I am sure, data is valid"), self healing/ online scrubbing (needs both).
Click to expand...

Many zfs users don't seem to mind but it's a deal breaker for some people, me included. The restrictions on adding storage should be pointed out alongside the more positive aspects of zfs.

Snaphots and checksums are cool but not everyone values them highly. Most home nas users probably never bother with snapshots, and file checksums can be tracked using other tools.

_Gea said:
If you need encryption, you may use Solaris 11 or encrypted devices below ZFS.
(FreeBSD/OI/Linux/any Solaris).
Click to expand...

Solaris 11 brings other problems... You're locked into Solaris probably forever. Solaris is no longer open source. It's currently available to use in non-commercial settings but who knows what Oracle will do tomorrow.

The ZFS Working Group is working on adding feature flags so that the different zfs implementations can be more inter-operable but who knows if Oracle will "play nice" with the community development efforts. Oracle is not known for playing nice.

Yes, you can use GELI for encryption on FreeBSD but it's an ugly hack that has the potential for serious problems when used with zfs, especially if used incorrectly. There are good discussions on the FreeBSD mailinglist that go into detail on that.

ZFS is an awesome technology and it definitely has its place. However, I don't believe that it is always THE answer for everyone, especially home users.
 
You cannot add storage to an existing zpool? Am I reading that right?

That would be a deal breaker for me as my collection is fast growing.

In the first feature video on OpenMediaVault, it shows how you can "Grow" storage using RAID5 (which I knew anyways), and that's a selling point for me.

If an AMD A4 can handle software RAID in its sleep, then I guess I'll give OpenMediaVault a try!
 
You can grow a zpool, just not one disk at a time (nor can you grow an individual vdev.)
 
Azhar said:
You cannot add storage to an existing zpool? Am I reading that right?
Click to expand...

You cannot add a single disk to an existing zpool. You have to add a new vdev. A vdev is a group of disks. The number of disks in a vdev depends on the raid level you want. The minimum is two disks for raid1. Of course, it will be more for the raid5/6 equivalents.
 
kristof said:
Many zfs users don't seem to mind but it's a deal breaker for some people, me included. The restrictions on adding storage should be pointed out alongside the more positive aspects of zfs.

Snaphots and checksums are cool but not everyone values them highly. Most home nas users probably never bother with snapshots, and file checksums can be tracked using other tools.
Click to expand...

I am responsible for our IT department for more than 20 years so i have seen a lot of problems and data disasters. I may have avoided a lot or most of them with ZFS, snapshots and checksums!. Only one time since i use ZFS, there was a need for a disaster backup due to a multiple disk failure in a ZFS Raid-1 vdev.

I would NEVER trust a storage without ZFS like features these days with multiple Terabyte capacity.
The only options I may see are btrfs and WinReFS (not in par with ZFS) or closed source things like netapp and similar.
 
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_Gea said:
I am responsible for our IT department for more than 20 years so i have seen a lot of problems and data disasters. I may have avoided a lot or most of them with ZFS, snapshots and checksums!. Only one time since i use ZFS, there was a need for a disaster backup due to a multiple disk failure in a ZFS Raid-1 vdev.

I would NEVER trust a storage without ZFS like features these days with multiple Terabyte capacity.
The only options I may see are btrfs and WinReFS (not in par with ZFS) or closed source things like netapp and similar.
Click to expand...

Snapshots are great thing in the hands of an IT professional. For the average home user...I'm not convinced. They're better off with a real backup.

Same with checksums... The files people store on these 10's of TB home servers are not exactly mission critical. It isn't the end of the world if a bit flips here or there.

Ease of adding additional storage is usually the biggest concern for the average home user.
 
freenas-4k-random-mixed.jpg


Have a look at :
FreeNAS vs OpenSolaris ZFS Benchmarks ;)
=> http://www.zfsbuild.com/2010/09/10/freenas-vs-opensolaris-zfs-benchmarks/

Cheers.

St3f
 
Well this is all moot anyways. FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault and Openfiler will not install on my A75 Hudson D3 Extreme6 board. They all won't see my DVD drive after boot. FreeNAS crashes when attempting to boot (the same disk works fine on two other computers), and OpenMediaVault says I don't have any drives. I guess there's not much support for AMD's Hudson D3 chipset at the moment.
 
Azhar said:
Well this is all moot anyways. FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault and Openfiler will not install on my A75 Hudson D3 Extreme6 board. They all won't see my DVD drive after boot. FreeNAS crashes when attempting to boot (the same disk works fine on two other computers), and OpenMediaVault says I don't have any drives. I guess there's not much support for AMD's Hudson D3 chipset at the moment.
Click to expand...

This may be more hassle than you want to get into... You could use a different motherboard to install OpenMediaVault on your disks, upgrade to a recent Linux kernel, and then move the disks back to the Hudson board.

AMD and Intel usually do a good job ensuring that the Linux kernel has good support for new platforms before they are released to the public. The trouble is that many distributions lag behind kernel releases. OpenMediaVault uses a Linux kernel from 2009 so it's no surprise your Hudson board isn't working right.
 
kristof said:
This may be more hassle than you want to get into... You could use a different motherboard to install OpenMediaVault on your disks, upgrade to a recent Linux kernel, and then move the disks back to the Hudson board.

AMD and Intel usually do a good job ensuring that the Linux kernel has good support for new platforms before they are released to the public. The trouble is that many distributions lag behind kernel releases. OpenMediaVault uses a Linux kernel from 2009 so it's no surprise your Hudson board isn't working right.
Click to expand...

Aye, I'm going to stick with trying to figure out why WHS 2011 isn't working properly for me (my other topic "Severe Media Storage Stutters").
 
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