For an environment where the budget is extremely tight and minor downtime is not a big issue, FreeNAS is very much capable to provide all shared storage needs. It is easy to set up, feature rich, and best of all, free. The following screenshot is a typical FreeNAS dashboard presented upon login. The screenshot has been taken from FreeNAS 9.2.1.5. Other versions may be slightly different.
FreeNAS provides many services such as AFP, NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, FTP, SSH, SNMP, RSYNC, and so on. FreeNAS can take advantage of ZFS, which offers a stable platform to build a virtual environment on.
Note
ZFS was originally designed by Sun Microsystems combining filesystem and logical volume manager to create a new type of filesystem, which supports high storage capacities, provides protection against data corruption, performs continuous integrity checking, and so on. To know more about ZFS, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS.
At a glance from the FreeNAS volume status page,...