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Our shots from Barcelona, GURU advisor will be at the MWC until thursday to tell you about news and previews from the mobile world.

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FreeNAS is a FreeBSD-based Operating System whose development began in 2005 thanks to Olivier Cochard-Labbè and whose main function is to transform the computer or server where it’s installed in a NAS (Network Attached Storage). The system was conceived to require a limited use of hardware resource, apart from storage, so that it can run smoothly also on old or performance-wise limited machines.

The development of FreeNAS went on with the years and reached the actual 9.3 stable version and 10 “Alpha” version (the support to the 32-bit UFS file system was abandoned in 2014). In 2009 iXsystems (a company dealing with servers and storage solutions) showed interest in the FreeNAS project in order to avoid the migration of the system on Debian and the subsequent loss to the support for ZFS, after the then project leader. After an important revision and update by the iXsystems’ team, in May 2011 FreeNAS 8.0 was released.

FreeNAS is based on the OpenZFS implementation of the Sun (then Oracle) system called ZFS, so it takes advantage of all the code base of this project to manage ZFS volumes, disks and devices.

Building a virtualization lab is a common scenario both for domestic needs, or when budget is limited, and for testing needs like trying new software or checking compatibilities and updates too risky to be run into production.

We have tested the Primergy TX 1310 M1: this entry-level solution by Fujitsu in the tower-format field is available online with a starting price spanning between 400 and 500€ (vAT included). Considering that the processor -an Intel Xeon Haswell with support to Intel’s VT for Direct IO technology- is sold for ~250€, it’s a tempting offer.

Hardware and equipment

The model we tested is equipped with an Intel Zeon E3-1226v3 (quad-core, 3.3GHz, 8MBytes cache but no Hyper Threading), coupled with 4GByte DDR3 1600MHz ECC RAM and a spinning 500GByte SATA III disk. As for connectivity, on the back there’s place for the classic VGA video out, a serial port, 4 USB 2.0 ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Four USB 3.0 ports are distributed between the back and the front, where a SATA DVD burner is also available.

One of the main limits with the free version of vSphere is not being able to manage the host from a Web interface. This lack is remarkable in particular for those who use a Linux or Mac platform where the classic Windows vSphere Client can’t be installed.

The ESXi Embedded Host Client is a very interesting and recent solutions, published as a VMware Fling in 2015, to fill the lack of a universal client: it’s indeed a Web client developed in HTML and JavaScript that allows to access to and manage an ESXi host.
At the moment the release to download is v 4.0, which is available as a .vib file ready to be installed via shell or as a package containing the Open Source code.
The first vSphere that is natively supported is 6.0, although the client works with vSphere 5.5 onwards, but with some identified and documented limits and bugs.