
Introducing FreeNAS Corral - pstadler
http://www.freenas.org/blog/introducing-freenas-corral-an-open-source-hyper-converged-storage-platform/
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lisnake
Wow, I didn't realise that FreeNAS had come so far. Featureset looks amazing
and better than most of enterprise solutions.

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snuxoll
Bear in mind, ixSystems HAS an enterprise solution based on FreeNAS called
TrueNAS - we bought two appliances with 72TB if usable storage to handle image
storage for our ECM suite which has BILLIONS of small images. The things run
like a champ, and outside some minor issues with the AD integration we've
taken care of they've been a great storage solution.

~~~
defgeneric
Same experience with FreeNAS 9.x and AD.

But... I just upgraded to FreeNAS 10/Corral and the AD integration just
worked!

Previously there was a `generate_smb4_conf.py` script that translated the UI
selections into a `smb4.conf` file, but our AD had some weird schema issues
that required a custom config. I ended up hacking parts of the generator
script to get it to produce the right thing. In FreeNAS 10 it seems they
switched to samba's Registry Configuration [1].

[1] [https://www.samba.org/~obnox/presentations/linux-
kongress-20...](https://www.samba.org/~obnox/presentations/linux-
kongress-2008/lk2008-obnox.pdf)

~~~
snuxoll
My issue was actually the way their HA setup attempted to configure itself
with duplicate SPN's - I ended up needing to manually export a key tab with
ktpass to use it instead of getting it via winbind.

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shad0wca7
I've been using FreeNAS 9.10 for just under a year now having originally moved
from Ubuntu Server. Its feature set, ease of use and stability really is
incredible. Can't wait to try Corral out.

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johnramsden
I'm excited to see FreeNAS "Corral" come out and the user interface looks
great, however I'm still disappointed that jails are not able to be used.

I'm not sad to see the plugins system gone, it was terrible and I always set
up my own custom jails on FreeNAS anyway, but It would have been nice to be
able to use jails at least from the command line. I guess they don't want to
have to worry about supporting both.

I just wonder about the extra overhead of having to run a virtual machine for
every container as opposed to just running a FreeBSD jail. bhyve is also not
as established as FreeBSD jails and I wonder about stability. Now you're
having to worry about the stability of bhyve and docker. For just running
services like emby, syncthing, SABnzbd or the like I honestly think having the
option to just run a FreeBSD jail is superior. Considering it is FreeBSD under
the hood I don't see why the option is gone.

It's nice to be able to run Docker containers don't get me wrong, but I just
wonder if it is really the superior technology.

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X86BSD
Well done iXsystems and FreeNAS developers! You blow the doors literally off
everything else.

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beagle3
FreeNAS is awesome.

Does anyone know of a way to configure FreeNAS (or an alternative FS, such
LizardFS or Tahoe LAFS) that can provide the feature set of Isilon OneFS (not
the performance) with an open source implementation?

That is,

1\. to add more storage, just add another machine (everything looks like one
big volume, irrespective of machine/disk boundaries).

2\. replication / error correction / raid works across the entire fleet of
machines; that is, you can configure it so that up to 1-disk per node, and up
to 2-nodes overall can die without damage to data

3\. snapshots

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urza
If you dont know, take a look at [https://infinit.sh](https://infinit.sh)

~~~
beagle3
Interesting. The features I asked for are almost all in "enterprise" and
there's no price quote yes (or even a mention of whether enterprise is open
source - I am willing to pay for a good system, but not for one I can't
support myself)

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captasparagus
What is the status of ipfs integration? I know it was part of the v10 roadmap,
but I don't see any mention of it in Corral and have been unable to figure out
if it features in the Corral roadmap. Corral looks like it would be a great UX
for farming disk space for ipfs/filecoin in the future. Thanks.

~~~
Fzzr
Dropped from the 10.0 release. No idea if/when it will make it in. It was
working in ALPHA, but only as an experiment.

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urza
Is it possible to run Windows 10 as guest in Bhyve? I was planning to build my
workstation on Ubuntu as host OS. Running few VMs inside - two windows, two
linux and managing my ZFS pool (host os directly)... but if FreeNAS can run
Windows VMs, it would be ideal...

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grk
I'm wondering, what's the usecase for Docker there?

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lykron
They've always had the functionality to run software like Transmission inside
a Jail. I guess they just moved that functionality to docker to be more "hip".

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X86BSD
Reminds me of the joke, "How do you get docker to be secure? Run it inside a
(FreeBSD) jail."

Having not looked at it that's my guess what they are doing. Everything
related to it is in a jail. Making it secure regardless of dockers
questionable security.

~~~
floatboth
Of course jails are the underlying mechanism of that Docker port on FreeBSD
that someone did once… But I'm not sure they're using that. Linuxulator is not
perfect, and they announced "Docker support" not "imperfect Docker support" :D
I bet they're using something like boot2docker in a bhyve VM.

~~~
X86BSD
I'm trying to find out. Oddly enough searching the FreeNAS docs on the website
for "docker" returns nothing.

I've seen reference to jails mostly regarding running docker and to a lesser
extent bhyve.

Anyone running running corral or a recent snapshot that can say what secure
tech docker is running in?

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okramcivokram
It's described a bit in the video [1] they seem to use VMs as docker hosts.

[1] [https://youtu.be/x4IBKUmC5ns?t=1374](https://youtu.be/x4IBKUmC5ns?t=1374)

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gsnedders
What's FreeNAS like from a security point-of-view nowadays? How is it with
security updates being pushed out? How about default configuration?

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Ajedi32
You can set up email notifications to have your server email you when new
updates are available. They come out semi-frequently; maybe monthly. You can
install them from the web interface pretty easily; major updates usually
require a reboot.

By default I think the only way to access FreeNAS is through the web interface
(which seems fairly secure, though I'm not really all that familiar with
FreeNAS's codebase). No SSL by default, but you can set it up with self-signed
certs almost trivially using FreeNAS's GUI. You can enable SSH access and
other services manually, and those services come with their own set of
security concerns you need to be aware of.

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mrbill
Does this version still require a tiny slice of every data-storage drive be
used as swap?

I've got hardware built up but am still debating NAS4FREE vs FreeNAS.

~~~
justinclift
In FreeNAS 9.10, that's configurable via the webUI.

Haven't tried the released version of Corral though, so unsure if it's carried
through.

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abrookewood
The only thing stopping me using FreeNAS was that I can't run CrashPlan on
BSD. What are others doing for offsite backups?

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defgeneric
You can now run CrashPlan in a docker container on Corral. (In 9.x it's
available as a plugin.)

~~~
abrookewood
Awesome! Thanks.

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pmarreck
Looks like I lost all my backup configs (from windows via iSCSI and from my
Macs via time machine) :/

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littleboxes
Does it support heterogeneous drives?

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Fzzr
Yes, you can put drives of similar sizes in raid groups ("vdevs") together and
then stripe together dissimilar groups. You can also put them all together in
one big group, but in that case the group will act as though all the drives
are the size of the smallest one and waste the rest of the space.

Example disks:

* 2x 500GB

* 4x 1TB

Example of first option:

* Mirror of 500GB: 500GB

* RAID-Z of 1TB: 3TB

* Total Usable Storage: 3.5TB

* Total Overhead (Redundancy): 1.5TB

* Pool fails if any two drives of the same size are lost

Example of second option:

* RAID-Z1 of all: 2.5TB (Effectively RAID-Z1 of 6x500TB)

* Total Usable Storage: 2.5TB

* Total Overhead (Redundancy): 500TB

* Total Wasted: 2TB

* Pool fails if any two drives are lost

Terminology/facts in case any reader doesn't know:

* A mirror is what you'd think, basically RAID 1.

* A RAID-Z(1) is a RAID group with a single disk worth of redundancy, like RAID 5.

* RAID-Z2 and RAID-Z3 are two- and three-disk redundancy groups respectively.

* ZFS can stripe together any number of similar or dissimilar groups of drives, but if any one such group is lost the entire pool is corrupted.

Edited for formatting

Edit Edit: These behaviors are due to ZFS, not choices made by the FreeNAS
developers.

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machbio
Awesome.. I moved away from FreeNAS to Ubuntu 16.04 ZFS.. Now, back to
FreeNAS..

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noja
Damn nice. Can it import btrfs volumes?

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nfriedly
You might want to check out Rockstor - it's basically the same thing except
with Linux and btrfs.

[http://rockstor.com/](http://rockstor.com/)

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noja
I was on Rockstor before - but the number of "rock-ons" (approved docker
images) was too low, and raid5 btrfs comes with a giant warning, so I swithed
to FreeNAS Corral. It's brilliant. More a beta than the name suggests, but a
really impressive piece of work.

~~~
nfriedly
Hah, that's funny, I tried FreeNAS initially (an earlier version, though) and
gave up because it didn't like some of my hardware.

I'll grant you that raid5 is unstable and the "official" selection of rock-ons
is pretty limited. FWIW, adding your own rock-ons isn't very hard - basically
drop a json file in a folder and refresh the page. They also accept PRs, so
I've added a couple to the official list myself:
[https://github.com/rockstor/rockon-
registry](https://github.com/rockstor/rockon-registry)

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mdekkers
oh, shiny. I wonder if there is a way to make this run on my Synology...

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TheAceOfHearts
For any future readers / searchers, it looks like the link was changed [0].

[0] [http://www.freenas.org/blog/introducing-freenas-corral-an-
op...](http://www.freenas.org/blog/introducing-freenas-corral-an-open-source-
hyper-converged-storage-platform/)

~~~
dang
Thanks. Updated from [http://www.freenas.org/blog/introducing-freenas-corral-
world...](http://www.freenas.org/blog/introducing-freenas-corral-worlds-first-
open-source-hyper-converged-storage-platform/).

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rustynails
According to the release notes, you can update to Corral and roll back to 9.10
via the GUI.

The system requirements are still 8gb RAM and 8gb disk minimum.

There are no details of the performance.

Release notes are here.

[https://download.freenas.org/Corral/RELEASE/ReleaseNotes.txt](https://download.freenas.org/Corral/RELEASE/ReleaseNotes.txt)

