I have yet to decide between FreeNAS and Nexenta yet – but for today wanted to get the ball rolling installing FreeNAS 8 in VMware vSphere 4.x.įirst download the FreeNAS 8. I will be installing FreeNAS to a 1GB virtual hard disk instead.

A 1GB drive is recommended as the minimum requirement and this can hold several FreeNAS images – so you can roll back to a previous installation if you experience troubles during an upgrade for example. At the moment, for example, it looks like FreeNAS does not support de-duplication of data while Nexenta does.įreeNAS is designed to be run from a flash drive which is nice in that all of your hard drives can be dedicated to storage. One key difference to be aware of (and these will be moving goalposts) are the versions of ZFS that both of these projects are running. The other ZFS contender that has piqued my interest is Nexenta whose community edition has an 18TB limit (although you can run the Nexenta Core version with a community developed GUI without any storage limit).

The features of ZFS are many but it is the data integrity and large capacity support that caught my attention when I first started to ponder alternatives to Windows Home Server (WHS). It is also worth mentioning that FreeNAS supports Advanced Format drives (something that my Windows Home Server does not). FreeNAS is an Open Source Storage Platform and version 8 benefits not only from a complete rewrite – it also boats a new web interface and support for the ZFS filesystem.

Nexentastor install to usb drive