Running the appliance
You don’t have to install a virtual appliance; just run it, which means first starting the VMWare Player. This will prompt you to browse for a virtual machine configuration file, so here I directed it to the C:\FreeNAS_VM folder and clicked on the FreeBSD file unzipped earlier.

The VMWare Player will inform you that the virtual machine has been changed or copied since it was last on and that a new unique identifier (UUID) should be generated for it. That done, the virtual machine and its guest operating system can be seen loading in a window on the PC Desktop, just as though loading onto a ‘real’ PC.

And that’s really all there is to it. Once it’s loaded you’ll have another virtual machine running on your PC. This will share the host’s (ie physical) network interface, but will be bridged to a different IP address, which you can ping just like any other network device.

You can also enter commands from the console window, although there’s very little you can do on this appliance other than change its IP address, reset the web password or power it down. Everything else is done via a built-in web interface. To access that you need to start a browser and enter the IP address of the appliance as displayed in the VMWare Player window.

Configuring the appliance
Just as with a real appliance, you have to log on to FreeNAS to manage it. The default user name is ‘admin’ and the password is ‘freenas’, after which you’ll see a fairly basic menu-driven interface.

The menus here let you tweak a host of features to get the FreeNAS appliance to share files using a variety of protocols on different networks. However, for Windows you’re only interested in CIFS – the Common Internet File System, also known as Server Message Block, or SMB.

CIFS support is provided by Samba, and enabled by default so all you have to do is tell the appliance the name of the workgroup or domain to use. I’ve clicked on CIFS in the menu tree to get to the appropriate screen and changed the workgroup name to Editorial – the name of a workgroup on my Lan.

I’ve left the NetBiosName entry as ‘freenas’, which is what the appliance will be called when browsing from Windows Explorer, but I’ve chosen Local User in the authentication dropdown.

I could have left this last entry as Anonymous, for anyone on the network to access the appliance, but by specifying Local User, only those on the built-in user list are allowed in.

I also had to select Users and Groups and from that menu create a group to add valid users for them to see and use the CIFS shares. By default just one share is configured (called raid5), but you can easily define others if you want.

And to access the shares, you just open the My Computer folder and select My Network Places as normal. An entry marked raid5 on FreeNAS server (Freenas) should then be listed.

Putting it to work
Loading and running a virtual appliance this way is easy. Rather than buy a custom Nas appliance, a virtual implementation can be downloaded and set to work on a redundant Windows or Linux PC in a process that should take about an hour.

Performance will be dictated by the PC and if you’ve lots of files to store, a disk upgrade may be in order. But it requires hardly any technical expertise. Plus it’s a good first step to understanding what virtualisation has to offer.

More appliances
There are many other virtual appliances you might like to try. Most are written for use with VMWare, making the VMWare Technical Network website a good place to start.

The FreeNAS appliance can also be downloaded from here along with hundreds of others to, for example, create virtual firewalls, content-filtering appliances and a lot more besides.

Another good site is www.virtualappliances.net, which has appliances for the Xen virtualisation platform as well as VMWare.

Most virtual appliances will be based on open-source software that can be downloaded and run free of charge, but check the licence terms carefully. Plus you need to be aware that the people who build the virtual appliances aren’t necessarily the original developers or sellers of the software.

The level of support you can expect will vary enormously and may be limited to the implementation as a whole rather than the components on which it’s based. Plus many are effectively beta software, which means they’re likely to be incomplete, and prone to the odd bug here and there.