Installing the FreeNAS storage

FreeNAS is one of the most popular freely available storage systems that is easy to set up and maintain. It provides common storage protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, AFP, and more. Using an off-the-shelf commodity hardware, one can set up a fully functional shared storage within minutes. There is a paid version of FreeNAS that comes with a preinstalled storage system sold by iXsystems called TrueNAS. For more details on TrueNAS, visit http://www.ixsystems.com/truenas/.

Note

Note that for the purpose of this book, we have used FreeNAS since it is very easy to set up for a beginner, and it has lots of storage features that don't involve too much investment. One single FreeNAS node can provide a variety of storage options for you to try. You can use any other storage of your choice to try different storage plugins available in Proxmox.

There are a few other viable choices besides FreeNAS, which also provide very good shared storage without the added cost:

Storage...