If you have more questions about FreeNAS and ZFS, I would suggest doing more reading before going off on comments to the effect of "no file server needs this much RAM". I use the ZFS "exporting" feature to back up my data to an off-site ZFS system. I use three 2TB drives in a three-way mirror and have separate datasets (with separate shadow copy settings) for documents, photos, movies, and music. I run a FreeNAS server precisely for N-way mirroring and maintaining shadow copies of my data. None of the benefits of ZFS/FreeNAS are mentioned in the article, such as the ability to do N-way mirrors, software implementations of hardware RAID setups, datasets, shadow copies, etc, nor why these features can be helpful or essential components in a comprehensive backup strategy. As to the intense hardware (mostly RAM) requirements, a more detailed understanding/explanation of ZFS is necessary. For one thing, FreeNAS is built off of FreeBSD, not Linux. So, grab a copy of FreeNAS and start playing around in your home lab with NFS and iSCSI.I agree with DragonPoo that this article is seriously lacking. FreeNAS is a great piece of software to run and test real storage protocols and applications in a lab environment and otherwise. As shown here, to configure FreeNAS 9.10 NFS VMware ESXi 6 datastore only requires a few steps on both sides and is simple and quick to complete. NFS is a great lightweight protocol that can be effectively used for creating VMware NFS datastores. The folder should look familiar as this is the path in the Add Unix (NFS) share configuration.įinally, we finish out of the Add Storage wizard.Īlas, if we check our storage configuration, we should see our new NFS datastore mounted. Next, we point our VMware ESXi host to the NFS server IP and also the folder which we want to point to. Click the Add Storage button in the Storage configuration. Now, we simply need to Add Storage to our server. Next, we need to assign an IP address that has connectivity to the NFS server and share.įinally, we finish out of the add network wizard. So we create a new network and select VMkernel as the connection type. ![]() ![]() I am simply using the existing standard vSwitch on which I have iSCSI vmkernel port groups already provisioned on for the purposes of the lab. We need to create a vmkernel port IP address which will be used to connect to the NFS server and share. Next, let’s take a look at setting up our VMware configuration to connect to the NFS share. Now we see our path specified in the NFS share. Under the Advanced Mode view, we can specify the Authorized networks as well as Maproot User which is the credentials of the specified user used for remote access. When we click the Browse button, we can browse to our volume mount. Go to Sharing > UNIX (NFS) > Add Unix (NFS) Share. Next, we go to Sharing which is where we actually setup our NFS share. Then add the available disks we want to use by clicking the “plus” sign next to the drive. Go to Storage and click the Volume Manager button. Now, let’s setup our storage we are going to use for NFS. So we check the IP under the Bind IP Addresses. Really, for basic NFS setup, all we really need to set here is select which IP address we want to bind to the service. Once we click on the wrench icon, we get another box with more we can configure. Also, once you flag on the switch, click on the “wrench” icon to configure the NFS service. To turn on NFS, you need to go to Services and toggle the switch to ON for NFS. I have setup a management IP as well as another interface that I have bound for NFS connectivity. For the purposes of the post, I am running FreeNAS as a VM which is a great way to play around with iSCSI and NFS in a lab. You will want to provision your storage and your network connectivity on the appliance itself. ago Go into the shell and do this for troubleshooting: chown -r /vmfs/volumes/ datastore name nobody:nogroup Then see if it works. ![]() I am not covering here the setup of FreeNAS in general. FreeNAS Operating system Software Information & communications technology Technology 1 comment Best Add a Comment SovereignR0B 4 yr. The specific version of FreeNAS I am using is 9.10.2 U3 and is the most recent GA version on the FreeNAS site at the time of this writing. Configure FreeNAS 9.10 NFS VMware ESXi 6 datastore So, starting off simple here, let’s take a look at how to configure FreeNAS 9.10 NFS VMware ESXi 6 datastore. Like iSCSI, NFS can use an existing IP network as well. With NFS there is no encapsulation that needs to take place as there is with iSCSI. NFS has a lot of benefits and use cases particularly when we look at the efficiency of NFS. Many choose to use NFS as opposed to iSCSI in their VMware vSphere environments.
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