Nacho's picture

Hi to everybody,

I discovered Turnkey and their amazing appliances not so long ago, and already tried some of them, having one (fileserver) working in production. It's really easy to use and fantastic to configure, though it needs to have some knowledge of linus systems to fix correctly the permissions for the users.

Anyway, trying to get more information about how to make it better, I found information about ajaXplorer and owncloud, which look great alternatives to extplorer (kinda discontinued, I think). Would be great having Fileserver working with one of them, though recently found out that owncloud is not so "open-source" anymore (at least not so the clients).

Trying to get more information as I could about some improved solution for sharing files, came to me Zentyal, which looks an amazing product to, not just sharing files, but also manage a lot of more services for small companies. As it's not a TKL appliance I'm wondering if some of you guys, who have further experience than me have tried it. It's like domain controller, email server and file sharing all in one.

Would be great combine some of the resources to make a "perfect sbs" solution, as Zentyal looks great, but also lack of some features.

Hope I can have some feedback here!! Many thanks anyway.

Forum: 
Eric (tssgery)'s picture

And it's pretty nice. I set up a Zentyal server and used it for DHCP and DNS services and it worked very well. That said, I have gotten to some of the real niceties of TKL, such as TKLBAM and the ability to personally tweak the distro and add things that I want.

If you're looking for an Ubuntu based SBS right now, it's really good, but I'd rather have a TKL based version.

Nacho's picture

Yeah, I mean, TKL appliances are great, and as I'm just a noobie, I'm starting to discover all the features, but what are you using guys for virtualization?

I mean, I'm a opensource solutions lover, so my options are maybe linux distro (like Ubuntu or CentOS) + kvm or proxmox, which is already great to virtualize.

But the thing is, discovering Zentyal, looks like it has already virtualization out of the box, giving it maybe the best chance to become a TKL partner, isn't it?

Eric (tssgery)'s picture

You'll find that we all use a wide variety of virtualization technologies. Personally, I use both VMware vSphere and Hyper-V. Neither are opensource, of couse, but that are both free (well, Hyper-V is free is you have Windows 2008 Server). I have used Proxmox, VirtualBox, and KVM as well. 

When I used Zentyal, I did not use any of their VM Management features. According to a VERY FAST glance, it looks like Zentyal supports VirtualBox and KVM but I can't tell what they add (if anything) to help you manage the virtual machines. I'd be interested to know if they've built a webui or provide something like phpVirtualBox. If you have a go with it, I'd love to see your comments about it as a virtualization technology.

Jeremy Davis's picture

But personally I can't go past Proxmox. Especially now that TKL OVZ templates are available from within the WebUI. All I want now is a nice UI way to preseed values (eg passwords etc) to them on firstboot (like the Hub does) and it'll be the ultimate answer IMO.

If you browse the forums you will see what an avid supported of PVE I am and I have been using it successfully for years now. IMO Proxmox has a lot of good things going for it, firstly it is opensource and completely free. But I think the best thing is that is has both OVZ and KVM virtualisation technologies. OVZ (and the rapidly developing LXC) are container based virtualisation which uses very few resources. It only supports Linux guests though hence the inclusion of KVM as well.

TomW's picture

I prefer Amahi or SME Server 8.   ClearOS is about on par with Zentyal I've found.


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