From the course: Learning FreeNAS

Lab setup

From the course: Learning FreeNAS

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Lab setup

- [Narrator] In this course, I'll be setting up FreeNAS in a virtual environment, not on real hardware. And as you're learning about FreeNAS I encourage you to do the same. Working with FreeNAS in a virtual environment allows you some flexibility that you won't have with real hardware. And it provides a safe place to practice with configuration and recovery, without putting data or your real hardware at risk. Probably the biggest advantage of working in a virtual environment is the ability to add disks to the system. Using sparse disk images, we can create all kinds of configurations, without having to have real hard drives on hand. And, without taking up a huge amount of space on the host system. Instead of having to have 32 4 TB disks on hand just to practice with, we can create virtual disks in seconds and build out all kinds of variations to practice with. And we can easily remove disks, to a minor or a catastrophic degree, to explore how recovery works. We'll just have to remember not to actually try and write terabytes of information to these disks. I'll be using VirtualBox, the free virtualization software available from Oracle. I'm using bridged networking, so my server can join my network directly. My FreeNAS server will have a reserved IP address assigned to it by DHCP. It has 8 GB of RAM and I'll give it a hard drive that's 32 GB. Attached to it, I have four 1 TB virtual disks, which are really sparse disk image files. I also have a Windows client, which I'll be using to access the FreeNAS web interface and which I'll use to connect to the server to share files, later on. If you're familiar with VirtualBox and want to use that environment, take a moment to set up something similar. If you're not familiar with VirtualBox, take a look at my LinkedIn learning course called "Learning VirtualBox." You can also follow along using real hardware if you have a system that you want to use. However, if you're using real hardware and especially if you're setting up a system to use in production, I'd recommend that you watch this course all the way through first so you can develop your plan and then come back and follow steps that you might want to complete. As we set up the FreeNAS system, we'll create some users in groups. We'll also be creating two areas for file storage. One area for user home directories and one for sharing files between members of a team. This course is intended to be an introduction to FreeNAS for people who are already somewhat familiar with, or comfortable with storage. With working at the command line and who have some previous experience in system administration.

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