Configuring FreeNAS via the web GUI - PART 2

Now that you have created an admin user and configured FreeNAS to access the internet we can build our storage. What I have done is create two mirrored Vdevs and added them to both to a ZFS storage pool.

My pool looks like this

This may not be the optimal configuration as my knowledge of ZFS is limited (and existing media on the disks meant I had to juggle it around a bit so could only create one Vdev at a time, copy data to the the new pool, and once the other disks were empty I could extend the pool with a new Vdev). This set-up allows for two disk failures for my pool to remain intact, but only one disk can fail from each Vdev.

There is a brilliant ZFS Presentation created buy a regular contributor to the FreeNAS forums which explains ZFS in a way that is easy to understand. I recommend you read it.

Creating a ZFS Pool

Select Storage-Active Volumes-ZFS Volume Manager. Give your pool a name and add your disks. The manager will automatically assign the optimal Volume layout based on the number of disks you are adding

• 1 Disk - STRIPE
• 2 Disks - MIRROR
• 3 Disks - RAIDZ1
• 4 Disks - RAIDZ2
• 5 Disks - RAIDZ3

In my case I called my pool ZFS1 and initially added two disks that were mirrored. I later came back to ZFS Volume Manager and selected ZFS1 as the volume to extend and added a second pair of mirrored disks. This gave me a pool of the size 3.6TB

That's pretty much it. In the next post I discuss creating Datasets and making those Datasets available to your clients via CIFS and NFS shares