Easy OS for NFS and Samba Server

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

ro345

New Member
Jul 31, 2017
22
4
3
54
Hi All,
I'm looking to make an NFS and Samba server for my lab at work. I work for a large tech company and I have inherited an old, but still useful 3Par T400 SAN. The SAN has about 90TB of storage on it. The SAN speaks only fiber channel and iscsi. I need to be able to serve up NFS and cifs from my SAN, so I will front end it with a server. I have access to HP DL and BL servers, and would prefer to use my BL server since I have a FC switch in my C3000 chassis already. My BL servers also have 10Gig nics and 8 Gig FC HBAs in them already.

I'm looking for an easy to use OS that preferably loads on Flash or SD (so that I don't need local hard drives). I would prefer that OS is optimized to run on flash, and isn't constantly writing the flash file system to not burn up the flash. It would be nice to have a UI that could give me nice formatted statistics. The OS needs to be able to support Fiber Channel HBAs (qlogic) or be an iscsi initiator (note, I don't need the server to be an iscsi target).

I have used unraid for a long time, and I think unraid would be great for this. I obviously wouldn't use a parity disk, and would just mount one large 10TB (or so disk) on unraid and serve from that. However, I don't think unraid supports FC HBAs or iscsi initiators.

To be clear I do not need the operating system to provide fault tolerance at all, that is done in the SAN. I need the OS to provide ease of use and bridge file sharing protocols with SAN protocols.

I'm looking for something with a nice GUI, easy to learn and setup, optimized to run from flash, and supports FC or iscsi as drives. Thanks in advance.
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
3,161
1,195
113
DE
I would suggest a webmanaged ZFS appliance with Oracle Solaris as operating system where NFS and ZFS comes from with an in ZFS embedded NFS and SMB server. You can build a ZFS pool from your LUNs with the superiour ZFS data security. see Configuring Storage Devices With COMSTAR - Oracle Solaris Administration: Devices and File Systems

or an OpenSource Solaris fork around OmniOS or OpenIndiana., see openindiana – Community-driven illumos Distribution or OmniOS Community Edition

For webmanagement you can try my napp-it web-gui for any of these operating systems see http://www.napp-it.org/doc/downloads/napp-it.pdf