I have finally completed the great migration off my old homelab box. Over 5 terabytes of data were migrated off FreeNAS onto Windows Server 2019, I started on this project all they way back in January. Most people will think that this is a foolish idea but I will lay out the reasons why I wanted to complete this migration. First reason was that support for plugins on FreeNAS is awful, its mostly done by volunteers and you are always running at least one major release behind. Now people will say that you can just run VM’s or Docker on FreeNAS but the issue with that is that it creates layers between your files in ZFS and the apps running in the VM, this also adds a layer of complexity of exposing the files to the VM as they would have to be exposed on the network which is a headache.

So the reasons for Windows Server 2019 are simple, get auto updates from OS and apps, always the most current release. Easy to run and administer, can run so many more apps then Linux systems. Easy support for Docker and any other hyper-visors.

The very last thing to do is some clean up. I need to find 1 drive to add to the storage pool that mirror the remaining FreeNAS system files in order to pull the 6 TB drives out of the old box.