Open media vault alternative

Technology Alternatives
1

Hi there My proxmox server has limited RAM, therefore I am seeking an Openmediavault substitute other than TrueNAS/FreeNAS.

Something that can run on 2GB or 4GB is what I am searching for. Openmediavault looks like it would be ideal for my purposes, but I simply can not manage to make it work; it appears so unstable that I keep running into permission issues that I can’t seem to resolve.

While some of the people who have the same problem as me have posted on their forums, the majority of the posts remain unanswered or unsolved.

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2

There is TrueNAS Scale available. VM and Docker are included in its feature set. K8s are supported as well, as far as I’m aware. As of right now, it is still in beta, so I’m not sure if it is production ready.

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3

I would suggest looking into UnRAID if you are seeking a low-power NAS solution that can operate with 2-4GB of RAM.

Principal advantages:

  1. Stability and reliability, with an active community for support.
  2. Easy web-based administration.
  3. Flexible “unbalanced” storage approach.

UnRAID is a paid solution, but many users find the features and stability worth the $60 license cost, especially on limited hardware like your Proxmox server.

I’d suggest checking out some UnRAID tutorials to see if it could be a good fit for your needs.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

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4

If you know a little bit about Linux, you can see that OMV is rather simple. The primary issue is the way they first manage storage—they use environment variables; their documentation explains this.

As an alternative, there is Rockstor available.

Overall though, there aren’t many options for “NAS distributions”:

  • OMV (FOSS, Linux-Base)

  • UnRaid (linux-based, paywall-protected everything)

  • Rockstor (linux basis; most of it is hidden from memory by paywalls)

  • FreeNAS/TrueNAS/XigmaNAS (FreeBSD base, without the need for Docker; BSD jails are powerful but intricate, similar to LXC containers; can operate with file systems other than ZFS, such as XFS, resulting in lower RAM requirements).

  • Any Linux distribution that supports NFS, Samba/SMB, or other network storage protocols.
    Having an OMV-style management dashboard or online portal is beneficial, and Cockpit is one such tool.