There's also NASLite. This one isn't free, but it's still very affordable with it's $30 price tag. The advantage over FreeNAS is it's better performance (twice the speed is no exception!). On the other side, it does not allow any rights management, which FreeNAS and OpenFiler do.

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, while NASLite is based on Linux. OpenFiler is based on CentOS. I haven't tried OpenFiler (yet) myself, but I'm very curious to know how well it works and what it's performance is. It's very hard to find reviews for any of these apps. I've found a few (old ones) for FreeNAS and NASLite, but I've not been able to find any for OpenFiler, which is somewhat surprising.

Oh, and then there's also Open-e. This is a solution not really meant for home use, but they do have a nice trial version which could be used a home since it offers enough for most home users. (biggest downside is storage space is limited to 2TB). Might be worth to try.

I'm assuming you're talking about a beta firmware for the NAS. If those are Seagate drives, make sure you update their firmware as well. I'm sure you've seen reports of the issues with the Seagate 1.5TB firmware causing the drives to time-out.

Great for a lab environtment. If we're going to put our eggs in one basket, it's got to be a reliable basket with someone else to blame if something goes wrong. Which seems to put you back in the 10k SAN range, with 5k of that going for the "someone to blame". Which means the economics of a 5 to 10 server rack doesn't make a whole lot of sense, even though we can get vmware itself at a fairly steep discount.

I suspect this will change as vmware is no longer owned by a storage company, and as VMWare goes after the low end that microsoft will be going after. There's no reason they can't sync disk images over the management wire, even if it's a little slower.

And your solution to that is to run OpenFiler? I mean, there's nothing wrong with OpenFiler, but if all you need is an NFS share (which is all you need for ESX), the only thing it gains you is a configuration utility. There's certainly no one to blame.

I suppose you could go with Solaris instead. Sun developed NFS, there's support, and you can get an x86 box from them relatively cheaply.

You can still run it over NFS. Running ESX off a NetApp filer via NFS is a supported configuration and gives you several benefits over doing the same with iSCSI. Thin provisioning is one major one. The ability to do a flexclone is another big one.


EMC still owned the majority of VMware the last time I looked.


You can do that already. It just isn't recommended for the same reasons you want to have somebody to blame if something goes wrong with your SAN.

On VMware HCL are the Iomega ix2 and ix4-100 (I can't find it).
Granted I don't know If I'd want to run much of anything off of them...
On the cheap (cheap is relative...) iSCSI front Dell has the MD3000i, and EMC have their AX range, as do most of the other storage players.

No, my solution is to keep buying real servers. I was wondering if someone was using OpenFiler in a situation where their ass was on the line, as that's more of a vote of confidence for it than I've heard so far.

I have a small OpenFiler at work, admittedly it's still at the testing phase. But everything seems to be okay. I've got some Samba/NFS shares for office workers and some iSCSI targets for our edit suites. Assuming we go ahead, I'm looking at pair of clustered Openfiler machines, one at each site.

Our sister company uses NetApp filers, but we simply don't have the money. So we make do with what we can afford.

I wouldn't. iSCSI Target is just a module but you'd want to find somebody that is willing to give the level of support you require. RHEL don't seem to officially support it but thats just from random searching now.

We happen to have some NetApp filers for other reasons, so I have my ESX disk images stored there, but if we didn't, I wouldn't think twice about installing a generic x86 machine as an NFS server. I'd probably use Solaris as opposed to Linux because I'm happier with their LVM solutions, but NFS is solid.

Then again, I'm not a big fan of having someone to blame. It's pointless. Even if I could (or wanted to) point my finger, I'd be the one who chose them in the first place. Support, though, is a different story, and I can understand the desire to have an expert on call.

I don't know what you're intending to use ESX for, but I find it to be far more useful for Windows machines than anything else, because running multiple things on a single Windows machine can be a bad idea, and then you end up with a bunch of machines vastly overpowered for what they need to be doing. With VMWare, you can effectively have a bunch of really wimpy machines combined into one or two physical servers.

I figured I'd bump this for the ReadyNAS owners here. Just found out about ReadyNAS Remote, a secure tunnel solution for accessing the NAS on the road.

http://www.readynas.com/?p=1435