Comments on: Yes, You Can (Still) Virtualize TrueNAS

By: Michael Dexter

Michael Dexter — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 16:45:46 +0000

In reply to Tsukimi.

Proxmox will indeed support TrueNAS and this forum post will provide you some tips: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/freenas-on-proxmox-whats-the-current-state-of-play.84287/

By: Tsukimi

Tsukimi — Sun, 11 Apr 2021 17:00:13 +0000

I would like to know does PVE(proxmox ve) accepted?

By: Michael Dexter

Michael Dexter — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 23:18:39 +0000

In reply to Andy.

Andy,
If you are using a hardware RAID controller, no, FreeNAS, nor any other virtual machine will see the individual disks or know if one has failed. The optimal configuration if you only have a hardware RAID controller is to make a RAID 0 “array” of each disk, and pass those over to FreeNAS. You will not see SMART data, but you will have proper block-level access and a failure will be correctly detected.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 11:14:36 +0000

Hello Everybody,
I’m installed the freeNas on vmware esxi 6.5 with one system and one data disk.
The HW is one dell PowerEdge T420 with 6 HDD in RAID5 (HW raid controlling).
If one HDD fall out from the raid, the installed freeNas will be see this error? Or I will see any error in freeNAS?
After the error I normaly chang the hdd, and wait for the rebuild the array.
The freeNAS will until the rebuild normaly work ?
Thanks
Andy

By: Joon Lee

Joon Lee — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:07:08 +0000

In reply to Benjamin Sisko.

Try asking this question on our forums! You’ll get more eyes on it from the FreeNAS Community.
http://www.ixsystems.com/community

By: Benjamin Sisko

Benjamin Sisko — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 07:26:50 +0000

Hello Everybody,
How about Freenas as a straight VM appliance, only virtualdisks no pci passthrough, on top of a HPE Simplivity hyperconverged vmware cluster (formerly known as Omnistack) where the underlying storage is fully ssd based ?
Anyone has tested a Freenas vm in a hyperconverged infrstructure ?
Thanks.

By: Benjamin Bryan

Benjamin Bryan — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 05:10:33 +0000

In reply to Phonix. Hi, Phonix. I did some tests with VMware RDM mapping and FreeNAS awhile back and it did cause data corruption under heavy load (although this was with older hardware and an older version of VMware). Also anytime a drive would fail it was a pain to re-create the RDM mapping to replace the drive. It's much simpler to give FreeNAS direct access to disks.

By: Joon Lee

Joon Lee — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 23:39:47 +0000

In reply to Phonix. Yes, you can definitely use an iSCSI target provided by FreeNAS for use as a VMware RDM device. Just make sure the disks come up in Storage > Devices, then on a VM click add hard disk, click raw disk, and select one of the iSCSI disks.

By: Phonix

Phonix — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 21:30:50 +0000

In reply to Phonix. I meant VMware RDM - raw device mapping

By: Phonix

Phonix — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 21:14:59 +0000

What about VMware VM direct disk Access (adding a disk directly to a VM)?
I don’t mean PCI passthrough but disk who are not used for VMFS and added to a VM directly.

By: Chris Maksym

Chris Maksym — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 21:28:22 +0000

Is it possible to pass-through the lsi SAS9211-8I hba and still be able to use the freenas VM capabilities instead of the plugins?
I’m a guru not a pro but I want to run docker inside freenas to prevision for a hardware failure scenario and have the V2P backup option. I always have to disable the Hardware virtualization in the freenas VM when passing throught the lsi hba. To get around this I have used the past two configurations:
server 1 – vmware esxi 6.5 – worked great no problems. Here I ran esxi 6.5 with a lsi hba but I did not use pass-through because of the above issue. Instead I used RDM discs that were connected to the lsi hba. But…now on my…
server 2 – vmware esxi 6.7 – I’m getting disk faults – i’m still using the RDM but not on an lsi hba. I have tried the 9201-16i but had bios bugs and overheating problems. now i’m back to motherboard sata2 and sata 3 controllers. I have configured the vmware drives in both sata and isci but still get the errors.
screenshot of errors
https://drive.google.com/file/d/126uHx8Au3CrmejchBNBREIZLpMPSmabD/view?usp=sharing
My next test will be to pop the SAS9211-8I and RDM in server 2 to see if the errors go away.

By: Joon Lee

Joon Lee — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 21:04:30 +0000

In reply to Jancarlos. Please post this question on the FreeNAS forums!

By: Joon Lee

Joon Lee — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 21:04:08 +0000

In reply to Mark. This seems like a good question for the FreeNAS forums! forums.freenas.org

By: Jancarlos

Jancarlos — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 18:10:37 +0000

I got a Dell R320 with a PERC H710 from work and I have ESXi installed with a few Windows VMs on it. I want to use FreeNAS to house 7 drives to store Plex Media and other files to share across my network.
Aside from setting the PERC card to HBA and doing a PCI passthrough for the drives, is there anything else that needs to be configured?

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 10:47:59 +0000

How do you do PCI passthrough on Xenserver 7.4 thanks

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 08:58:24 +0000

Dear all,
as i am totaly new to that topic, i would like to move form bare metal to the VM, but one thing i do not understand very well is
– i have Xeon V5 1230, Supermicro X11SSH-LN4F-O with 16GB ecc. As i will not have so much of data at the beginnign i would like to use other VMs too for some other test purposes. Please be kind/not to strong to help me to understand – i should be HBA to make work the ESXi with FreeNAS vm well? I cannot i use present motherboards sata connection to work properly in combination of ESXi, raid, ZFS… here i am lost as i i know hardware raid is not advised, but for ESXi installation this is something very important?

By: Ales

Ales — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 08:57:33 +0000

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 16 May 2017 12:50:04 +0000

In reply to Brian. Atom has been garbage since its release, IMO. It's so doggy, even for a netbook--let alone a server! I say stick with real processors that were designed and purpose built for servers: Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron, nothing else. That's just my 2 cents.

By: Joshms

Joshms — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 17:00:12 +0000

In reply to igor. Double check and make sure you aren't missing any guest additions.

By: Joshms

Joshms — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 16:20:15 +0000

In reply to Ron Watkins. This would be a better question for the forums. It would be really hard to respond to so much technical detail here. Give the forums a try!

By: James

James — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 10:39:14 +0000

Awesome! I’ve been wanting to use FreeNAS in a VM for ages but so many people saying it will end the world etc. The only reasoning I could see was the fact they couldn’t see a way of reporting SMART to FreeNAS. But of course for quite some time you have been able to give the guest DirectIO on a PCI HBA, so I never fully understood the issue. Also you can pass SMART over by other means too. But DirectIO is of course the best way for FreeNAS to be left to it’s own management.
I absolutely can’t wait for FreeNAS 10 to come out of beta because it looks like a game changer just buy measure of the GUI!

By: Keith Nash

Keith Nash — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 21:22:00 +0000

“3. Using a single disk leaves you vulnerable to pool metadata corruption which could cause the loss of the pool. To avoid this, you need a minimum of three vdevs, either striped or in a RAIDZ configuration. Since ZFS pool metadata is mirrored between three vdevs if they are available, using a minimum of three vdevs to build your pool is safer than a single vdev. Ideally vdevs that have their own redundancy are preferred.”‘
I don’t understand this precaution. Can you explain? I have two virtualized FreeNAS systems, both with a pool comprised of a single RAIDZ2 vdev (7 disks in one server, 4 disks in the other). Are you saying that my FreeNAS metadata is somehow at risk, despite having the capability of losing 2 drives from each pool without losing the pool’s data?

By: Ron Watkins

Ron Watkins — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 21:47:41 +0000

Questions…
1) If I disable the host controller cache, then the random R/W speed drops from 1GB/s to 10-20MB/s, which is a significant reduction in performance. Since we need to keep the speed up to 1GB/s, keeping the controller cache enabled is desirable. What downsides do you see with the controller cache? From what I can tell, it will keep any data safe, even through power failure using the FBWC. I don’t see how this can “hurt” in any way. Please elaborate.
2) I plan to have a set of 1Tb vDisks presented to the FreeNAS VM. These vDisks will come from ESXi datastores, which are flushed when the ESXi server shuts down. The UPS powerware software first commands the VM’s to perform a clean shutdown, followed by ESXi, and then the host. A crash of ESXi is much less likely than a crash of FreeNAS, so im not worried about the underlying HW. Im assuming I just create a ZFS pool using the set of 1Tb vDisks from ESXi?
3) How can I attach the QLE2562 8GB FC controllers directly to the VM to allow them to be used to export the target luns I create on FreeNAS. I think this has something to do with passthrough mode, but I don’t know how to set that up. Can you clarify how that’s done?

By: Tommaso Ercole

Tommaso Ercole — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 17:57:34 +0000

xen-tools are included since the first release of 9.10 😀

By: igor

igor — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 02:49:07 +0000

I tried to run installation on Server 2012 r2 and having problem with keyboard data entry. Cant send input command to start install

By: George Hafiz

George Hafiz — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 16:41:23 +0000

In reply to Patrick. I suspect the virtualisation solutions of ESX and BSD jails to be plenty efficient for nesting, unless you're talking about performance intensive tasks running in your jails. Either way, I'd suggest taking the path of least resistance initially. Optimise performance when you have performance problems, never before.

By: abinyah

abinyah — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 22:47:19 +0000

I have (against all online/forum wisdom) been using FreeNAS ZFS under VMWare for +3 years now on a Dell T320 8 bay. I can attest to the best practice recommendations above, and also caution against less than 8GB RAM and RAID controllers for all the reasons mentioned above. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work.
I have broken every rule above and found that a Virtualized FreeNAS ZFS is more reliable than most other alternatives. FreeNAS has been one of the best things for Virtualization since the baremetal Hypervisor.
I use ZFS for photography archiving (along with separate backups), and so far, ZFS has been the most stable storage setup I’ve had over the last ten years (including the extra external backups, go figure).
If I had to choose today, I would get another T320 8 or 18 bay and have FreeNAS run baremetal. As a VM, I would not hesitate to run it even two levels removed from the hardware. BTW, I did have HDD failures over the years, and hot swapped out a drive on the PERC and FreeNAS handled it flawlessly. Still I wouldn’t recommend any of that without first having a good backup.

By: Michael Dexter

Michael Dexter — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 22:27:06 +0000

In reply to Brian. Unfortunately, yes, and it takes a pretty advanced user to notice this. Kudos!

By: Michael Dexter

Michael Dexter — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 21:31:43 +0000

In reply to Thomas W.. FreeNAS is still considered a bare-metal OS with virtualization only being suggested for testing and demonstrations. However, "Yes, You Can Virtualize FreeNAS" and your mileage may vary. Do feel free to share your findings on XenServer.

By: Michael Dexter

Michael Dexter — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 21:27:35 +0000

In reply to Golan. Many people test FreeNAS under VMware and you should have no problems with this as long as you take the article's advice into consideration.

By: Michael Dexter

Michael Dexter — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 21:15:41 +0000

In reply to Kice. You never want to use a RAID card with FreeNAS unless explicitly in JBOD mode. If referring to passing through a HBA, your VM host may support the individual passing of drives through but "virtual" disks are not recommended for production use. They are quite useful for testing and demonstrations.

By: Michael Dexter

Michael Dexter — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 21:10:37 +0000

In reply to Shawn. FreeNAS 9.2.1 had reasonable Hyper-V support but one is generally discouraged from virtualizing FreeNAS. What issues are you experiencing under Hyper-V?

By: Shawn

Shawn — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 22:50:32 +0000

Any chance of basic Hyper-V support (just network drivers would be idea to start with). Windows Server Hyper-V is free and a pretty good alternative to VMWare.

By: Kice

Kice — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 07:39:11 +0000

I don’t want an extra RAID card to run FreeNAS on a VM. Can I do it without it, and can FreeNAS work as normal?

By: Golan

Golan — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 08:04:24 +0000

Is it possible to install FreeNAS as VM in vSphere and share the volume via iSCSI? I’d like to use it for a nested lab.
Anyone tried already?

By: Thomas W.

Thomas W. — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 15:19:49 +0000

Okay,
So what I’m reading is that I can decommission my old ATOM processor that I’m using for FreeNAS, and spin up a VM in my XenServer? I know that when I read this article it talks about home labs and ‘testing’ things out, but what about if I just want to use this as an every day home file server, that at most deals with TimeMachine backups?

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 22:31:03 +0000

As much as I’ve been flamed on the forums historically for saying that it works just fine and there are no issues if designed correctly, it’s nice to see an official stance on the subject.
More of a chicken and egg scenario I have is do you run jails while virtualizing FreeNAS or just other VM’s to accomplish other services…nested-vm overhead that’s click-click done vs manual patching but possibly better performance.

By: nzalog

nzalog — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 22:35:07 +0000

Does this mean VMXNET3 drivers preinstalled on freenas distorts any time soon? I’ve been having to hack them in…

By: unholythree

unholythree — Mon, 25 May 2015 05:39:56 +0000

Will xen-tools be included in any future builds of FreeNAS?

By: Benjamin Bryan

Benjamin Bryan — Thu, 21 May 2015 13:09:28 +0000

Thanks for posting that, Josh. Glad to see FreeNAS under a VM is finally official! I have a 9.3 server doing weekly scrubs without using PCI pass-through (zpool is on vmdks) without issues so far, what are the problems or causes you’ve found that lead to your recommendation to disabling scrubbing? Are vmdks not able to keep up?

By: Josh F

Josh F — Fri, 15 May 2015 16:43:15 +0000

It’s good to finally see an official statement regarding this!

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 14 May 2015 20:41:32 +0000

So this means that Atom 2758 based motherboards are a bad choice since they lack VT-d. Darn.