FreeNAS 8 isn’t ready or reliable

5th May 2011 9 By Simon

Unfortunately whilst I really wanted to like FreeNAS 8 I can’t, because it’s so flaky. What you ask??

I installed FreeNAS 8 yesterday morning and carried out some performance testing yesterday, it wasn’t particularly strenuous testing, infact it’s the same testing that I have been doing to all of the other storage solutions so far.

The testing I did yesterday was the same test carried out for and by Vladan.

First of all here are the results of my iSCSI testing using ZFS.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, the iSCSI results are better than the NFS results that were achieved over at Vladan.fr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I had really great hopes for FreeNAS 8, obviously NFS performance isn’t anywhere near the Open-E DSS v6 product but the iSCSI performance wasn’t so bad.

In wanting to continue with my own testing regime I started running my own tests this morning, the idea being that I would use these tests in part 3 of my NAS/SAN Shootout series, unfortunately 45 minutes into my testing I suddenly had a machine that refused to respond to any commands, further checks showed that the iSCSI datastore was now inactive whilst the NFS datastore was still online, the FreeNAS web console was also still active and allowing me to browse all of the different sections on the site, nothing unusual appearing on the site.

A reboot was initiated from the web console and a persistent ping initiated from my desktop. Unfortunately whilst the server responded to pings after a couple of minutes, the web console itself took over an hour before it would initialise, not only that but that still left me with issues with the datastores. My iSCSI datastore was reinstated at reboot, unfortunately my NFS datastore now appears as inactive and unfortunately that’s the final straw for me.

FreeNAS 8 is not ready for Release status, there are still far too many issues that people are experiencing with this product, there are feature sets missing from it (admittedly not things I need or require) that people are crying out for (and apparently being scheduled for FreeNAS 8.1 in the future). What with the unreliability of the product during light testing (a single VM running IOmeter SHOULDN’T bring the host\datastore down) and the fact that a remote reboot doesn’t restore all of the functionality expected I really do have to advise people to use FreeNAS 8 at their peril.