NAS4Free 11 Storage Installation and Configuration on VMware Workstation

NAS4Free 11 Storage Installation and Configuration on VMware Workstation

This video tutorial shows NAS4Free 11 Storage Installation, Configuration and Overview on VMware Workstation/Player step by step. We also create and configure ZFS Disk Pool and setup Samba/SMB/CIFS share on NAS4Free storage. This tutorial is also helpful to installing NAS4Free 11 on physical computer hardware or bare-metal server.

NAS4Free 11 Installation Steps:

1. Download NAS4Free 11 ISO
2. Create VM on VMware Workstation/Player
3. Start NAS4Free 11 Storage Installation
4. NAS4Free Initial Configuration via Web GUI
5. Create ZFS Disk Pool
6. Configure and Test CIFS/SMB Share
7. NAS4Free 11 Storage Overview

Install and Configure NAS4Free 11 Storage on VMware Workstation

What is NAS4Free NAS Storage?

NAS4Free is an Open Source Storage NAS (Network-Attached Storage) distribution based on FreeBSD. NAS4Free is the new brand name of the original FreeNAS 0.7 code which was developed between 2005 and late 2011. The NAS4Free operating system can be installed on virtually any hardware platform to share computer data storage over a computer network.

NAS4Free supports sharing across Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems. It includes ZFS v5000 , Software RAID (0,1,5), disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T / email reports etc. with the following protocols: CIFS/SMB (Samba), Active Directory Domain Controller (Samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI (initiator and target), HAST, CARP, Bridge, UPnP, and Bittorent which is all highly configurable by its WEB interface. NAS4Free can be installed on Compact Flash/USB/SSD key, Hard disk or booted from a LiveCD/LiveUSB with a small usbkey for config storage.
NAS4Free Website: http://www.nas4free.org/

NAS4Free 11 New Features and Improvements

NAS4Free 11 comes with system RRDGraphs monitoring, new SMB protocols and configuration options, integrity checks for firmware upgrades, new Zend OPcache and APCu modules, FastCGI as default web server, updated config to version 2.8, and updated language translations. NAS4Free 11 is also the first release of the project to no longer support 32-bit platforms. Downloads are now available only for 64-bit computers as Live USB and ISO images.

NAS4Free 11 Minimum Hardware and System Requirements

1. Browser: IE 10 or higher or other recent browser.
2. Processor: Multicore 64-bit processor or better.
3. Boot device: 2GB minimum for "Embedded" platform, 4GB for Full platform.
4. Memory:  2GB minimum Ram.

Hope you found this FreeNAS 10 Corral installation, configuration and overview tutorial helpful and informative. Please consider sharing it. Your feedback and questions are welcome!