cyberjock said: Honestly, this somewhat scares me.. not sure how the update system will handle this (going from this custom build to some future build based off the standard builds). Click to expand...

Until Freenas moves to FreeBSD 10, the. However, the update process and functionality in the FreeNAS GUI works just fine using an update file built using the process to add Xen support (i.e. has a correctly xen-supporting GUI_Upgrade.txz file with its own matching sha256 hash). If you're using PVHVM disk/network drivers for near-native IO performance under Xen, then using the standard upgrade downloads will break disk and network access and its a headache to recover from.Obviously using- but for those of us running in Xen-based virtualised environments, its not like we have many options :) For me, the race is on between Freenas and nas4free - the first one to move to FreeBSD 10 with its kernel-support for Xen will pretty much corner the market, which includes Amazon EC2 (its Xen based).Cloud-based ZFS storage (with snapshots, backups, etc.) is a very nice tool for supporting cloud-based infrastructure. Between virtualised FreeNAS and pfSense, my infrastructure needs are taken care of, and I use a mix of Linux (Centos, Fedora, Ubuntu server) and Windows (xp/7/8.1) all of which use varying mixes of nfs, cifs and iscsi from my freenas instance. Yes, all that functionality can be provided without using Freenas, but having a GUI to manage it all simplifies things greatly.The most important point however, is that this is an entirely unsupported combination of FreeNAS and xen - I wouldn't run mission-critical stuff on it period. Its a "use at your own risk" configuration.