# Buiding a SAN server based on FreeBSD



## fred974 (Jan 11, 2019)

Hi everyone,

I am building a xcp-ng cluster and started using FreeNAS but I just find out that HA is not available unless going for TrueNAS.
As I cannot afford the cost of TrueNAS, I am trying to build a HA san with 2 servers based on FreeBSD in order to create an iscsi target.
Could anyone please advise on reliable software to use to do this? 
Opensource and free if possible.

I hear of glusterfs and ceph but not sure how good is the performance. 
Also is it possible to create a SAN based on ZFS? 

Thank you


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## Phishfry (Jan 11, 2019)

HAST, CARP and ZFS are your path forward for a FreeBSD based SAN.


fred974 said:


> is it possible to create a SAN based on ZFS?


With ZFS, bare volumes can be provisioned via iSCSI, so a ZFS fileserver can be an array for a full-fledged SAN.
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/hast-and-zfs-with-carp-failover.29639/


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## nihr43 (Jan 12, 2019)

HAST indeed syncs disks, but I remain skeptical about the actual failover process with something like nfs or iscsi.
Do take a shot at it, I would love a similar setup myself.

glusterfs performance is heavily tied to inter-node network performance as I understand it.  With direct interconnects between storage nodes, and/or some fancy routing, it might  be possible to improve the situation somewhat.


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## Phishfry (Jan 12, 2019)

I do notice that gkontos has a different opinion of ZFS with HAST in this thread.
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/ha-cluster-encrypted-storage.59090/#post-345805


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## gkontos (Jan 12, 2019)

Yes, I would only use HAST if RAID was handled by a controller and not ZFS. That way, I would only expose one device.


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## Giteh (Sep 9, 2020)

Are there any updates? Is it possible to create such SAN?


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