Our recently installed FreeNAS on an HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L is currently being used for backing up VMs (CentOS 6.0 KVM).
The web-based GUI is quite easy to work with, and the filesystem (ZFS) is quite resilient as we found out after a couple of power failures caused by accidentally tripping our ground protection fault / RCD switch…
Still, I’ve ran into some issues that will hopefully be resolved in the next Beta-release:
- Remote syslog does not work due to an error in the startup script (Ticket #1433)
- Transmission PBI configuration does not work, always reset to defaults (Ticket #1477, Ticket #1512)
The syslog configuration can be fixed manually in /etc/rc.conf. The Transmission PBI needs more fixing before it can becomes useful; at the moment it insists on saving downloads into the jail’s root directory, which has limited quota.
Overall verdict so far: FreeNAS is a great piece of software, ZFS snapshots are awesome, still a couple of rough edges but hey, it’s a BETA ;-)