Curious:NAPP-IT vs Freenas

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CreoleLakerFan

Active Member
Oct 29, 2013
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The biggest advantage is that you never have to read cyberjocks drivel at the FreeNAS forums.

All seriousness aside, Solaris has better SMB/CIFS support than BSD - if you're hosting shares for Windows clients this may be of interest to you. Probably not a huge deal for a home or small lab environment, but when you're supporting end-users it can make a difference. Obviously, this assumes you're running NAPP-IT on Omni-OS or similar.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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I think the biggest advantage is that @gea provides the VMWARE Image ready to drop and go. FreeNAS is +/- for virtualizing and then of course there's the cyberjockrash dude to deal with :D

I have 2 identical builds (mobos/cpu/ram) that I'm comparing them too from a performance stand point... results will be ~1month or so due to surgery, but I plan to provide more info on that soon.
 
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bds1904

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Aug 30, 2013
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I've hard good luck with omnios+napp-it. The prebuilt image is great and ad integration just works. I've used freenas, nas4free and a few other ZFS solution, but napp-it is the best overall IMHO.

I prefer the interface of napp-it because it's more manual. That being said, it is also more organized and has little hints everywhere. Many of the config pages have basic config guides right on them; it is nice.

Comstar (iSCSI, Fiber Channel & FCoE software on Solaris) is also superior than the Linux/bsd based alternatives. Comstar handles reads/writes more efficiently with less latency (personal experience only) and also seems to handle a sLog better. Switching from freenas, I saw much lower latency writing to the slog on solaris. Comstar is also super easy to set up on napp-it, all GUI based

CIFS/NFS shares are also easy to set up. Make a filesystem, hit the button to share and select users. Easy as pie. All on 2 pages as a matter of fact. Create your filesystem, hit OK. The next page that comes up is where you can adjust the shares. Again, napp-it is just organized and laid out to flow from one task to the next.

IMHO solaris based ZFS solutions are more refined and stable then their Linux/FreeBSD counterparts.
 
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gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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Do not forget to run a "pkg update" at console to update OmniOS the OVA 15c to fix the newly discovered L2Arc bug.

This is fixed in the napp-it OFA 15d that i have uploaded now.
The 15d also includes support for TLS mail (alerts via Googlemail)
 
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acmcool

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Jun 23, 2015
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Do not forget to run a "pkg update" at console to update OmniOS the OVA 15c to fix the newly discovered L2Arc bug.

This is fixed in the napp-it OFA 15d that i have uploaded now.
The 15d also includes support for TLS mail (alerts via Googlemail)
Thanks...Did the update...
Was able to import my existing Freenas volume..
More testing to continue with AD integration,SLOG ,replication and Shares
 
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whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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I've hard good luck with omnios+napp-it. The prebuilt image is great and ad integration just works. I've used freenas, nas4free and a few other ZFS solution, but napp-it is the best overall IMHO.

I prefer the interface of napp-it because it's more manual. That being said, it is also more organized and has little hints everywhere. Many of the config pages have basic config guides right on them; it is nice.

Comstar (iSCSI, Fiber Channel & FCoE software on Solaris) is also superior than the Linux/bsd based alternatives. Comstar handles reads/writes more efficiently with less latency (personal experience only) and also seems to handle a sLog better. Switching from freenas, I saw much lower latency writing to the slog on solaris. Comstar is also super easy to set up on napp-it, all GUI based

CIFS/NFS shares are also easy to set up. Make a filesystem, hit the button to share and select users. Easy as pie. All on 2 pages as a matter of fact. Create your filesystem, hit OK. The next page that comes up is where you can adjust the shares. Again, napp-it is just organized and laid out to flow from one task to the next.

IMHO solaris based ZFS solutions are more refined and stable then their Linux/FreeBSD counterparts.
Another vote/kudos for COMSTAR stack, solid, remember when Linux was the laughing stock of the iSCSI target world and considered 'abt as stable as Hellen keller on crack' :-D The iSCSI target (IET) is fairly solid/re-worked now in Linux thank god but still, uphill struggles.

Good reports using COMSTAR presented iSCSI file/volume (prefer these) LUNS as well as using FC target on some Q-Logic HBA's a few yrs back. Just worked. All CLI here baby, learn to love stmfadm, sbdadm, itadm, and iscsiadm and life is good.
 
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gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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How do i create NFS and SAMBA shares?
on OmniOS/ Solaris
Samba is an option. The default is the Solaris CIFS kernelbased and multithreaded server.

To enable SMB and NFS shares with napp-it
- open menu ZFS filesystems
- click on off in the row of a filesystem under SMB or NFS and switch off to on

For anonymous SMB access, enable guest, otherwies create users (or use user root)
 

acmcool

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on OmniOS/ Solaris
Samba is an option. The default is the Solaris CIFS kernelbased and multithreaded server.

To enable SMB and NFS shares with napp-it
- open menu ZFS filesystems
- click on off in the row of a filesystem under SMB or NFS and switch off to on

For anonymous SMB access, enable guest, otherwies create users (or use user root)
Thanks...
Seems like P3700 does not work as pci passthrough..
SAMBA on vmxnet3 150MB/s -200MB/s its one x520-sr2..Freenas was giving 120MB/s max...
I hope I can get P3700 working as slog and replicatio working..Then I probably will buy pro license..
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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Illumos is working on NVMe drivers.
So P3700 may be possible in the near future.

Currently it may work with Oracle Solaris 11.3 where you also get SMB 2.1
btw: Its not Samba (a SMB server) on OmniOS, its SMB (the protocol) with the Solaris/OmniOS CIFS server.
 

acmcool

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Cool..That will give me my SLOG back..
Would volume 5000 work in Solaris 11.3? Or I would need to rebuild it?
May be I can do one Solaris 11.3 instance and one NAPP-IT for now...
You have done some cool stuff in NAPP-IT...Really easy to use..
 

gea

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Oracle use their closed source ZFS > v.28 but with ZFS encryption -
only pool v28/ZFS v5 is compatible between Oracle Solaris and OpenZFS (not v5000).

Solaris 11.2/ 11.3 is supported by napp-it with the default wget installer.
 
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JayG30

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Feb 23, 2015
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I must be one of the few that actually prefers freenas. Nothing against gea or napp-it. He is very active and supportive of the product. And being built on OmniOS has advantages. However, for me, freenas is just easier. I look at the comparison as two parts. First Solaris/OmniOS vs FreeBSD. I like OmniOS but find it much harder to find people who have experience. In the end for me FreeBSD is easier. Second is the Web GUI. For me FreeNAS is simple, Napp-IT feels convoluted even for simple tasks. Others might feel different and it is really a preference thing.

FreeNAS 10, built on FreeBSD 10, when it becomes available I feel will be a major step forward for the project and change how people see it.
 
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