I'll just start out with this link...
So, Corral was pretty garbage from a back end/development standpoint, and they decided to axe it. If you're interested in the whole story, I'd take a read through the thread, but TL;DR - They're rolling all the features of Corral into 9.10 with a newer UI.
What does that mean for my install though? Well, Corral isn't production anymore, and honestly, it's shaken any kind of faith I've had in FreeNAS. I'm adopting Proxmox VE as my all in one solution. I know I ragged on it in the previous post, but I decided to roll a VM install to test it out, and after killing and reinstalling it a few times, I found it seemed really stable. The documentation or existing all in ones was few and far between, but I'm pretty comfortable with Debian, and I'm up for a much more pleasing challenge after BSD. So this afternoon, I nuked my FreeNAS install, and installed Proxmox VE.
Here's the fun part about Proxmox. There was no struggle. The install was seamless. The import of my ZFS pool was literally a single command, and everything just worked. Creating shares was an Ubuntu container and a mount point away. It actually took me less than an hour to configure the sharing I wanted, and get a headless Deluge instance running. Fine tuning took a bit longer, but was considerably less painful than FreeNAS. Virtual machines JUST WORK. There's no messing around with config files and setting GRUB boot points. There's no GUI errors regarding "This virtual machine doesn't exist" that disappear after logging out and logging back in. Setting save when you save them, instead of having to do it multiple times over. It's going to be a while to get it all to the point I want it to be at, and to be fully confident in managing it, but it's definitely a treat so far.
A quick rundown on the setup - The Proxmox host has the ZFS pool mounted directly on it, much like FreeNAS would. Instead of installing Samba on Proxmox directly (This likely would have been fine), I've installed it in an Ubuntu 16.04 container, and bind mapped the media directory (The only thing that should be shared from it) directly to the container. From there, Samba is installed on the container, users are setup, and file and samba permissions changed. My headless Deluge instance is also running in a container, with the /Media/Downloads directory bind mapped, and user/group setup to match the authenticated users group on the Samba server. This way I can still openly manage files (delete, edit, etc) from my authenticated account, and guests can still read files. As a trial run I'm pretty happy, though I feel I may implement LDAP on all of my servers for easier permissions management of both files and shares.
This is just a short post to advise of my fun detour, but I intend to have more posts about the migration in the near future. In my opinion, for those looking for an easy to mange hypervisor/file server all in one solution akin to the ESXi/FreeNAS solutions you usually see, Proxmox is promising.
So, Corral was pretty garbage from a back end/development standpoint, and they decided to axe it. If you're interested in the whole story, I'd take a read through the thread, but TL;DR - They're rolling all the features of Corral into 9.10 with a newer UI.
What does that mean for my install though? Well, Corral isn't production anymore, and honestly, it's shaken any kind of faith I've had in FreeNAS. I'm adopting Proxmox VE as my all in one solution. I know I ragged on it in the previous post, but I decided to roll a VM install to test it out, and after killing and reinstalling it a few times, I found it seemed really stable. The documentation or existing all in ones was few and far between, but I'm pretty comfortable with Debian, and I'm up for a much more pleasing challenge after BSD. So this afternoon, I nuked my FreeNAS install, and installed Proxmox VE.
Here's the fun part about Proxmox. There was no struggle. The install was seamless. The import of my ZFS pool was literally a single command, and everything just worked. Creating shares was an Ubuntu container and a mount point away. It actually took me less than an hour to configure the sharing I wanted, and get a headless Deluge instance running. Fine tuning took a bit longer, but was considerably less painful than FreeNAS. Virtual machines JUST WORK. There's no messing around with config files and setting GRUB boot points. There's no GUI errors regarding "This virtual machine doesn't exist" that disappear after logging out and logging back in. Setting save when you save them, instead of having to do it multiple times over. It's going to be a while to get it all to the point I want it to be at, and to be fully confident in managing it, but it's definitely a treat so far.
A quick rundown on the setup - The Proxmox host has the ZFS pool mounted directly on it, much like FreeNAS would. Instead of installing Samba on Proxmox directly (This likely would have been fine), I've installed it in an Ubuntu 16.04 container, and bind mapped the media directory (The only thing that should be shared from it) directly to the container. From there, Samba is installed on the container, users are setup, and file and samba permissions changed. My headless Deluge instance is also running in a container, with the /Media/Downloads directory bind mapped, and user/group setup to match the authenticated users group on the Samba server. This way I can still openly manage files (delete, edit, etc) from my authenticated account, and guests can still read files. As a trial run I'm pretty happy, though I feel I may implement LDAP on all of my servers for easier permissions management of both files and shares.
This is just a short post to advise of my fun detour, but I intend to have more posts about the migration in the near future. In my opinion, for those looking for an easy to mange hypervisor/file server all in one solution akin to the ESXi/FreeNAS solutions you usually see, Proxmox is promising.