The |omv| system is the most flexible Network Attached Storage (NAS) on the market, this is because it relies on the operating system Debian GNU/Linux [9]
Any system has software and hardware requirements, also minimal ones and recommended ones.
| Item | supported | Minimal | Best | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DRIV | SSD/HDD/USB... | 1,any | 2,HHD | 2 disks: Seagate Firecuda, WD Black, IronWolf |
| RAM | 1GiB+ any | 1GiB | 4Gig | 8GiB+ dual channel DDR4/DDR3 |
| NIC | WiFi/Ether/USB | any | 10Mb NIC | 1GiB NIC or 10Gb NICs: SFP fiber |
| CPU | arm,x86,x64 | 32bit | 64bit | Intel Dual Core, AMD Ryzen |
This is the key of the system. |omv| supports any drive hardware and any drive interface (SATA, ISE, SCSI, USB, SERIAL) but information and management will depend on the disk drives supported by the Debian operating system. Supported Debian OS versions can be checked in the :doc:`releases section </releases>`.
Modern storage drives have firmware inside that reports several attributes. Any storage drives is supported but |omv| only supports SMART for those disks that are connected to an HBA in pass-through mode.
The system manages two types of storage unit classification:
- System drive storage (SDS)
- The Storage Disk Drive(s) used to put the system program files. This system drive (which can consist of several partitions) cannot officially be used for shared resources or as user data drive. The recommendation for the system drive(s) hardware could be older spinning Hard Disk Drives (HDD), Disk-on-Module [3], CompactFlash [4] or thumb drives (USB), the Solid State Disks (SDD [2]) must be managed. Best option are the Helium Hard Drives (HHD).
- Data drive storage (DDS)
- The storage disk drive(s) where the user data will be stored. Cannot be the same of the system drive(s) and sizes will depend of the usage of the stored user data. Shared resources are managed over partitions, which is discussed in the software requirements topic below. The recommendation for the Data drives must be Solid State Disks (SSD [2] disks) for best performance or spinning Hard Disk Drives (HDD) for better device durability over time.
Enough RAM is vital to maintaining peak performance. There are several combinations of installation sizes but the recommendation is at least 4GiB for novice administrators.
For best practice you should have 8GiB of RAM for basic operations in default installation, and no matter the size, RAM must be configured in Dual Channel mode [8] inclusivelly if there are little amount of, it will improve performance.
Unless other NAS systems the |omv| system can run in at least 1GiB of RAM, but of course will need expertise.
A NAS system as means is a network oriented system, of course |omv| is the most flexible NAS system in the world and allows multiple ways of communication, this is becouse |omv| offers several modes of shared resources like RSYNC that do not depends on networking. But there are few key points:
- The NAS write speed to storage is limited to the speed of your NAS computer NIC card.
- The NAS write speed to storage is limited to the speed of your network.
- Speed of writing to the storage depends on ratio of the number of users accessing it.
Full-duplex NICs are recommended, half-duplex NICs typically offer 10/100 Mbit/s and storage drives far exceed those speeds but are of course supported by |omv|.
Any supported NIC vendor is determined by the support of the operating system where |omv| system resides and runs, which is Debian GNU/Linux.
We have already denoted in the requirements table the supported architectures or processors (which reduces and determines which computers can be used) but this is really a reference since it is determined by the support of the operating system where |omv| system resides and runs, which is Debian GNU/Linux.
Any computer system supported by the common requirements of Debian operating system could be an |omv| system installation target. Currently supported are AMD64 (x86/x86-64 64bits), i386 (x86 32bits), ARMv7+ARMv8 (arm64 64bits armel/armhf 32bits). The i386 version is no longer officially supported since version 6, although it is still published by the project due to the nature of |omv| technology.
| Item | Software | Minimal | Best | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OS | Debian Linux | oldstable | stable | Current stable (plus 1 month released) |
| BOOT | BIOS,UBOOT,UEFI | BIOS,mbr | BIOS,gpt | Disable Secure boot, gpt table |
| SDS | HDD,SSD,USB... | 1, 4GiB | 2, 120+500GiB | Disk drive with 120G root size, 8G swap size |
| DDS | HDD,SSD,USB... | 0 or any | HHD,1 per share | One disk or part per shared resource |
| NET | LAN,WAN,SAN,VPN | LAN | SAN,PAN,LAN | Fiber IPv4, or at least cable LAN |
The |omv| is a piece of software, it resides and runs under a key software OS named Debian GNU/Linux as "the universal operating system" [9]
Supported Debian OS versions can be checked in the :doc:`releases section </releases>`.
While possible to deploy in a virtual environment, depending of the nature of virtualization it will degrade the performance access in various ways. Installation in LXC or any other container based solution is not supported.
Whatever the situation, the |omv| assumes that target operating system does not have any previous installation of any of the programs used by |omv| dependencies:
| software | package | related to | Observations |
|---|---|---|---|
| http server | nginx | |webui| | port 80 must be free at installation |
| http system | php | |webui| | only OS php packages wil be used! |
| display GUI | lighdm,xdm.. | Desktop install | Conflicts, any will be deinstalled |
| network man | netplan.io | Networking | network is managed by |omv| with netplan |
| ssh server | ssh | Remote access | any configuration will be managed |
| smb server | samba | Shared drives | any configuration will be managed |
| quota man | quota | Quota manage | any configuration will be managed |
The boot type and its support is determined by the Debian operating system which supports BIOS, UEFI, PXE, UBOOT and many others, the configurations of these depend on the installation of the operating system and once done the |omv| can be installed without problems.
However the downloadable and ready-to-use ISO image from the official |omv| website only supports AMD64 with BIOS mode boot at the moment. If you want to have |omv| on other computers with another boot type/mode, then you should install Debian first and then :doc:`manually</installation/on_debian>` |omv|.
Supported Debian OS versions can be checked in the :doc:`releases section </releases>`.
Any brand of storage disk will be supported as long as it is supported by the Debian operating system version, since it is where |omv| system resides and runs, which is Debian GNU/Linux, check it at the :doc:`releases section </releases>`.
The system storage disk will be fully managed and taken over by |omv| after installed. In case of the official ISO installation, will automatically partition the system storage disk drive into 3 partitons. Consult the next table for.
In case of a manual installation on a previous Debian operating system, this drive should have at least two partitions. Consult the next table for.
| Partition | Mininmal | Best size | Mandatory |
|---|---|---|---|
/boot |
256Mib | 500Mib | Optional, partition used to boot |
/ |
4Gi | 120GiB | Yes, the partition were system install |
swap |
100Mib | 16GiB | Optional, the partition for virtual ram |
The data storage disk will be partially managed by the |omv| after installation, and only in customized installation this can be a partition of the same system drive storage.
Each data storage drive will be managed, but regardless of the partitioning
scheme, all data drive partitions will be mounted at the /srv/ path.
The data storage drive must be a different disk drive than the system disk drive
where the operating system is installed. One partition of each data
drive can handle one or many shared resources.
| Partition | Min size | Best size | Mandatory |
|---|---|---|---|
/srv/<*> |
100Mib | bigger | Yes, size as need! E.g. 128GiB,500GiB,4TiB |
Take into consideration that as more exquisite the customization as less supported could be..
|omv| allows for minimal deployment and use of the system with very minimal hardware/software requirements, at the cost of the key knowledge, but other NAS systems allow ease of use at the cost of high requirements. |omv| allows both as well in a well balanced use case! [7]
It can be noted that |omv| systems can be installed on just 4GiB of system partition, with no more than 1GiB of RAM and using a WiFi or USB connection to access it remotely, on any small device such as Raspberry Pi or Banana Pi boars which are ARM, or old i386s machines no matter is those are 32 or 64 bits, but of course as more exquisite the configuration more knowledge will be need as per issue comment #131.
Technically OMV can be installed on a single storage disk, this is possible if it is done on a previously configured Debian system, with a free partition apart from the 3 necessary system partitions, previously formatted and configured. Of course this is only possible for skilled Linux users.
System Drives are not managed as same of Data Drives. System drives are not so intensively used, but Data Drives will need tricks to extend the useful life. Drivers support is by the project https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/TocSupport
If you use a Flash Drive, select one with static wear leveling 6, without this the drive will have a very short lifetime. It is also recommended to install and activate the Flash Memory plugin.
In the same Solid State Disk, or rather Drive (SSD) for x86 based architectures, is usually only recognized properly by the BIOS or UEFI, when in the BIOS/UEFI the feature AHCI has been activated for SATA (instead of IDE). Modern computers have that by default. But on old machines the default might/could be IDE. About ARM based computers this is not a problem, when used SATA interfaces, but on eMMCs will need some tuning because they are treated like Flash drives.
On SSDs, the cleaning action TRIM is recommended for the good performance in the long run. Otherwise it might become slow after some time. Very old SSD's from before 2010 usually don't support TRIM.
Take note that eMMCs, SSDs, Flash drives will have a lifetime degradation, excessive overwrites wear out those drives faster, specially in those very cheap.
On SSDs Hibernation (suspend-to-disk) causes a huge amount of write actions, |omv| is a server system so it is expected to stay always on or off.
Enabling encryption on SSDs also means more overwrites which wear out SSDs, eMMCs or Flash drives faster.
As well as enabling compression on filesystems like Btrfs or ZFS; although Ext4 has better commit timing; a parameter with commit=600 to 800 is best for this particular one.
Of course, the supported partition tables will depend on the installation mode, and |omv| can handle any type of partition table supported by the Debian operating system. This is because to manage shares on new or uninitialized storage drives it will need to create partitions or at least read structure of thems.
| [1] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging |
| [2] | (1, 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive |
| [3] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#DOM |
| [4] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompactFlash |
| [5] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive |
| [6] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling |
| [7] | https://forum.openmediavault.org/index.php?board/29-guides/ |
| [8] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-channel_memory_architecture |
| [9] | (1, 2) https://www.debian.org/intro/about.en.html#what |