FreeNAS Corral
Shashank Sharma looks at the popular NAS solution that has been reborn much like its reviewer.
Shashank Sharma looks at the popular NAS solution that has been reborn, much like himself.
The latest release of the popular network-attached storage solution is a ground up rewrite. FreeNAS 10 as it was known during its development is now called FreeNAS Corral because the operating system can now be used to corral data, storage devices, virtual machines and docker containers under one redesigned management interface.
Better support for the self-healing OpenZFS copy-on-write filesystem that ensures data is never overwritten, support for Active Directory and FreeIPA directory services, and improvements to the backup and replication functionality, are some of the ‘minor’ improvements. ZFS is one of the main reasons for the popularity of FreeNAS. It boasts useful features such as software RAID, known as RAID-Z, and filesystem snapshots that can be scheduled and stored remotely.
The real highlight is the addition of FreeBSD’s hypervisor that you can use to create and launch guest operating systems from inside your NAS. If you fancy containers rather than virtual machines, the release also integrates support for Docker as well.
The overhauled browser-based management interface is now more modern-looking and intuitive. Along with all the capabilities of its previous avatar, it now also lets you fiddle with the new virtualisation capabilities of the software. FreeNAS Corral also includes over a dozen easy-to-use templates. With these you get pre-installed, fully configured versions of popular BSD operating systems and Linux distros like TrueOS, FreeBSD, CentOS, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and more. You can also create VMs from your own ISO images.
Under new management
The management GUI is one of the most visible changes. The sidebar notifications are a particularly nice touch especially when you initiate timeconsuming processes such as creating a template-based VM. Another powerful feature is volume creation.
Corral contains four canned profiles for volume creation that strike the right balance between performance, capacity and redundancy. For example, if you select Media from the menu, the interface will award maximum weightage to capacity and some for redundancy at the cost of performance. The good thing about the interface is that it lets you alter the weightage and create custom profiles graphically.
The interface also lets you assign and use attached disks by dragging and dropping them from the pool of available disks into a storage pool known as vdev in ZFS parlance. These vdevs are automatically arranged in RAID formats depending on the number of disks in the pool. So if you have added five disks to a vdev, they’ll be arranged in RAID-Z3, which means that you wouldn’t lose your data even if three of the drives in the pool fail. You can also encrypt the ZFS volumes for additional security.
The interface also lets you add disks as spares so that when a drive fails, the system will automatically replace the failed disk with one from the pool of spares. Similarly, when you create a share, say an SMB or a NFS share, the interface lets you specify all related advanced options from within the browser window. For experienced FreeNAS campaigners Corral includes a new scriptable command line interface that can automate and control every aspect. If you are running the previous version, FreeNAS 9.10, you can also upgrade to Corral without issues. The FreeNAS devs plan to support FreeNAS 9.10 and release fixes and updates for “as long as there is an audience.”