In my neverending quest to run a decent ESX lab at home I’ve been messing around with some storage options on the cheap. Currently I use my iMac to serve up NFS storage to my ESX and ESXi hosts at home. This works fine but I wanted something a little, wellbetter!

Apr 17, 2012. Its hard to believe – box is running on Linux but without ability to setup firewall! In combination with many services running on the device, without any ability to disable them it makes highly insecure system. Web gui itslelf was also buggy, with a lot of needless things (they have a “facebook” and “youtube”. I have an iomega storcenter ix2-200. According to the documentation, it supports up to a 3 TB disk. My question is, what makes it support a 3 TB disk but not a 4 TB disk.

Has been around for a while as well as. I downloaded and played around with both, and just found FreeNAS to be a little simpler to use. The nice thing about both packages is 1. They’re FREE! They can run on standard PC hardware rather efficiently.

I had an AMD64 3200 mobo laying around and threw in 1GB worth of memory sticks I had into a beat up old case. The neat thing about FreeNAS is that if you can boot from an USB stick there is an embedded version that will consume a quaint 32MB of space and conserves your SATA ports for data disks. I started off with a 160GB drive and had some storage up in under 30 minutes. But that wasn’t quite “geeky” enough for me so I picked up 2 x 750GB drives off NewEgg for $120. Setting up the RAID1 mirroring was a little tricky though. I’m not going to get into specifics on how to install FreeNAS, there are hundreds of other websites out there to explain that. But here is how to get thru the RAID1 setup.

First when you log into the WebGUI (default login is admin/freenas) Go under Disks then Management. Even though FreeNAS can see your disks you have to manually add them. Click on the little plus sign (+) and add your disk.for each disk you add, change the “ Preformatted File System” to SoftwareRAID Repeat this for each physical disk you have in your machine. Be sure to click the button (not shown) that says “ Apply Changes” You should have something that looks like this. The next step is to go to Disks, Software RAID.

This is where we configure our RAID setup. This is where I got a little thrown off. Click on the little plus sign (+) to create your RAID. In my case, I have 2 drives so I’ll go with RAID1 so click on the RAID1 tab. Give your RAID array a name then ctrl-click both drives.

IMPORTANT – be sure to click the option to Create and initialize RAID, otherwise you go nuts trying to figure out the next step! Now go to Disk, Format. This threw me off because I thought my drives were already formatted, however now you need to format the RAID array, not the disks that “make up” the array.

FreeNAS is built on FreeBSD and UFS is the default file system so use that. Don’t worry, NTFS and Apple-Journaled work just fine with UFS and will do some VMFS later. Simply pick your newly created RAID under the Disk drop down and give the volume a name. You should see a ton of text generated while the disk is formatted.

(LOLin this example, the Volume Name I used was invalidcan’t have an underscore in there!) Finally the last step is to create a mount point so you can actually start using the storage. Click on Disk, Mount Point. Type should be Disk, the Disk should be your RAID array you created (properly formatted hopefully!) You need to specify a Mount Point, you need to remember this for when you enable some services, like CIFS. Again, be sure you click “ Apply Changes” after you click Save. Now we have some storage to use. Lets test it by creating a CIFS share.

Magic Ball Deluxe Serial on this page. Click on Services, CIFS/SMB. There is a bunch of configuration on the opening page, but the most important thing is clicking the little Enable checkbox on the right.

You can change the name, authentication, etc as you wish. Next click on the Shares tab. Give your Share a name, comment and you need to specify a Path.