Ditto - FreeNAS is FTW. A new RC of 8.2 was just released in the past week and it's awesome. The web interface was moved over to Django with the 8.x line from 7.x. It's minimal, but feature rich and "just works".
For my home setup I actually run FreeNAS in an ESXi environment. I have 4 different physical disks that I carve up space on and allocate to the FreeNAS VM. This allows me to snapshot upgrades on the base OS and when I'm testing an upgrade I can disconnect the ZFS pool - validate the upgrade went fine, and then reconnect the pool for a ZFS upgrade (if needed). The nice thing about this approach is you can physically move around system very easily if all you need to do is ship out the disk store - and since I have one beefy box for virtualization at home I have my storage system contained within which makes power and space a bit more efficient.
My suggestion to those who are considering this is if you stick about $500-$1000 into a BYOD system you can generally get a high end quad core system with 32GB of RAM and 3-5TB of disk space (with an SSD boot). At that rate I would carve up a few TB for backup and SAN (FreeNAS) and the rest would be for on-box VMs. The FreeNAS VM doesn't need more than 1 proc and about 2-4GB of RAM if you're dealing with a lot of file transfer. You can easily get away with 2GB.
Long story short:
ESXi + FreeNAS = 1-box solution for most at home geeks. My motivation was that I was starting to have "box sprawl" and power consumption was getting a bit out of hand. I also run PFSense on my box as well - but in that regard I also have a low power physical system that acts as the primary gateway device in my network. But there's a PFSense running as a VM as well for failover when I do upgrades. Far better than any SOHO gear you can buy for far too much $$$.
For my home setup I actually run FreeNAS in an ESXi environment. I have 4 different physical disks that I carve up space on and allocate to the FreeNAS VM. This allows me to snapshot upgrades on the base OS and when I'm testing an upgrade I can disconnect the ZFS pool - validate the upgrade went fine, and then reconnect the pool for a ZFS upgrade (if needed). The nice thing about this approach is you can physically move around system very easily if all you need to do is ship out the disk store - and since I have one beefy box for virtualization at home I have my storage system contained within which makes power and space a bit more efficient.
My suggestion to those who are considering this is if you stick about $500-$1000 into a BYOD system you can generally get a high end quad core system with 32GB of RAM and 3-5TB of disk space (with an SSD boot). At that rate I would carve up a few TB for backup and SAN (FreeNAS) and the rest would be for on-box VMs. The FreeNAS VM doesn't need more than 1 proc and about 2-4GB of RAM if you're dealing with a lot of file transfer. You can easily get away with 2GB.
Long story short: ESXi + FreeNAS = 1-box solution for most at home geeks. My motivation was that I was starting to have "box sprawl" and power consumption was getting a bit out of hand. I also run PFSense on my box as well - but in that regard I also have a low power physical system that acts as the primary gateway device in my network. But there's a PFSense running as a VM as well for failover when I do upgrades. Far better than any SOHO gear you can buy for far too much $$$.